Andy Burnham’s official parliamentary portrait, July 2026. Credit: House of Commons / CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons (cropped) “At this point, I won’t go as far as a moratorium,” Prime Minister Andy Burnham told the House of Commons on 9 September, when a Labour MP asked him to back a pause on new data centres. Jacob Reid reported the exchange for Bloomberg. On the same day, the think tank Verdant published a policy briefing that estimates planned UK data centres will create about a quarter of the permanent jobs the industry projects.
Sawdah Bhaimiya reported the findings for CNBC, along with responses from the trade body techUK and the government. Both rejected the report’s method. What Burnham said The question came from Ian Lavery, the Labour MP for Blyth and Ashington. “With tech billionaires driving the deployment of AI, many of my constituents are concerned about job losses, misinformation and the infrastructure needed to support this technology,” he said, according to the Northumberland Gazette. He asked Burnham to support a moratorium until regulation catches up, and to introduce a Critical National Infrastructure Levy.
Burnham said it was important that communities see the benefits of data centres in their areas. They “can be the magnet that clusters in other investment over time,” he said. He pointed to the government’s AI Growth Zones policy, under which councils keep any growth in business rates. Bloomberg reported that Lavery raised three “vast” data centres being built in his constituency in north-east England.
The Northumberland Gazette named them as the QTS scheme at Cambois, a site at West Sleekburn, and a third facility on Factory Road in Cambois. What Verdant found James Meadway wrote the briefing, titled “The Jobs Mirage of Data Centres”. It says existing UK data centres support about 4,400 direct jobs, against techUK’s estimate of 24,300. For planned sites, it projects about 10,400 permanent operational jobs by 2035.
TechUK’s forecast for the same period is 40,200. The gap comes from the counting method. TechUK assumes 8.5 jobs per megawatt of capacity, based on a typical site of 54 staff and 6.35 megawatts. Verdant says that figure reflects older, smaller data centres.
It traced job numbers for 20 planned UK sites through planning documents, company filings and press releases. Weighted by capacity, those sites average 1.2 operational jobs per megawatt. Across the whole pipeline, the report uses 1.6 jobs per megawatt, which produces its 10,400 figure. One of the 20 sites is the QTS campus at Cambois, in Lavery’s constituency.
The report cites a government response to a Freedom of Information request, which says the 720-megawatt campus is expected to create about 400 permanent operational jobs. That is 0.56 jobs per megawatt. TechUK’s ratio would have predicted more than 6,100, according to Verdant. How other industries compare The briefing also compares data centres with other large users of electricity.
On its own estimate, existing data centres support 8.6 direct jobs per megawatt of average load, or 47.3 on techUK’s figures. Steelworks support 291 jobs per megawatt, car plants 400, hospitals 3,626 and schools, colleges and universities 4,534. Verdant used government energy data and Office for National Statistics employment figures for the comparison. Verdant makes three recommendations.
It wants the government to pause consent for new large-scale data centres until an assessment framework is in place. It wants electricity and water availability to be a binding condition of planning consent. And it calls for a public consultation on the UK’s AI infrastructure. The industry and the government respond TechUK told CNBC that its estimates follow published methodology using industry data and standard economic impact techniques. “Verdant offers its own employment estimate using an unreliably small sample size,” techUK said.
It added that the report counts only people working inside data centres, “not the countless jobs that are supported by data centres and the services they provide”. A government spokesperson also disputed the findings in comments to CNBC. “This report relies on a deeply misleading jobs-per-megawatt metric, makes false comparisons with hospitals and schools, and appears to confuse electricity capacity with actual consumption,” the spokesperson said. The spokesperson added that the report “discounts the wider economic value of compute and the national security and sovereignty case” for building digital infrastructure in Britain. The report addresses its sample size itself.
The 20 sites make up about 28% of proposed sites on a map compiled by Global Action Plan, and Verdant says they account for most of the planned capacity. It says six of the largest schemes publish no operational headcount at all. For that reason, it describes its sample as likely to overstate job creation. Growth zones and other pauses The government has said its AI Growth Zones could bring up to £100bn of investment, Bloomberg reported.
Kanishka Narayan, the AI minister, has argued that the UK needs its own data centres to secure “AI sovereignty”. In August, responding to a call from Green Party leader Zack Polanski for a national pause, a government spokesperson said a pause “would be a disaster for jobs and national security”, according to the Verdant report. Pressure on the build-out has come from several directions. Scotland’s government is considering freezing new data centre applications because of energy demand.
OpenAI paused its Stargate UK plans in April, citing energy costs and copyright rules. Water is another constraint. Verdant cites Global Action Plan estimates that 84% of proposed UK data centres are in areas projected to be water stressed by 2040. In July, Water UK said AI data centre plans ignore where the water comes from.
In the US, New York became the first state to freeze new data centres for a year in July.
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