Green Party: “Grave concerns remain over East Havering Data Centre”

Mark Whiley, Chair of Havering Green Party, writes in today’s Havering Daily to state the party’s opposition to current plans and urges opponents, whom he says are under pressure, not to mislead residents.

Many in the Upminster and Cranham wards may have received a Green Party leaflet entitled “Tell the Residents Association: We don’t want Europe’s Largest Data Centre”. This featured several concerns about destruction of such a large swathe of high grade farmland and Green Belt, power usage, the impacts of various cooling methods to fresh water supplies for residential homes or forever chemicals that could pollute our environment, and years of transport and construction issues. 

In turn, I have attended two public meetings regarding the Data Centre, posing questions directly to Upminster ward councillors at some of those meetings. I’ve also sent responses to the council’s what the party describes as ‘controversial consultation exercise’, citing concerns over the cumulative impact of data centre development citing the Data Centre in Thurrock, urban sprawl, the impact on habitats including for skylarks and badgers, critiquing greenwashing in the application, and of course those other concerns that the Green Party highlighted in our literature.

Given this above, I feel it necessary to correct the record of any claims that the Green Party only have issues with the length of the Data Centre consultation.

Cllr. Gillian Ford, Leader of Havering Residents Association, attended a panel debate several weeks ago with Sami Rahman, a Green Party candidate in Elm Park. It was here that Sami explained that you didn’t need to destroy “huge swathes of land” to meet the data needs of big cities and that “distributed and nature integrated micro-centres are common in Eastern Europe”. It is my opinion that we will increasingly find that smaller, edge data centres will become the norm within this decade, as technological change in this sector is fast.

Here, it is correct to say that we do not oppose all Data Centres. Several of our candidates work as engineers, developers or work in other tech fields, including myself, and understand the need for compute near big cities. I’ve worked in streaming technology and virtualised storage, and I can tell you that data centres near big cities are largely for high latency or real time use cases.

What the local Green Party has collectively decided is a stance on this application in front of us – the Green Party says no. This is why many of us have engaged with residents organised against the Data Centre to hear and platform their views where others have not. The Green Party will strengthen the Local Plan around land use and believe that this type of planning tool, a Local Development Order, is unsuitable for a proposal this size.

We recognise the threat that a Labour Government could overrule any decision of the local planning authority to designate the data centre as Critical National Infrastructure. This is why its crucial to send a message to this government by voting for a national environmentalist party that’s working hard across South Essex opposing the eradication of Green Belt, and is likely to have success across London in May. The Labour Party has, and will, respond to Green success by trying to “out Green the Green Party”.

If part of the administration, the Greens will leverage our power as an authority, with our representatives on the London Assembly and with our Parliamentary representatives to call for a pause and rethink in Labour’s wider data centre expansion strategy. What the Green Party says it would never resort to is repeating what it describes as so called ‘greenwashing,’ data centre propaganda in the local press.

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