The Ministry of Consent

The institutions responsible for deciding whether a datacentre may be built in Britain are the planning system and the regulators of water and electricity: local planning authorities, the national infrastructure consenting regime, Ofwat and Ofgem. They were designed to settle disputes between neighbours, and to share out scarce pipes and wires among households and factories. They are now being asked to do something else entirely: produce public consent for an industry, to order, within twelve months. Assess the gap. It is wider than the firms appear to realise.

Consider what was actually reported. Companies including Nvidia, Microsoft and Cisco have told UK ministers that they have a year to head off public opposition before it hardens into American-style protest. The request is notable less for its content than for whom it was sent to. Its implied model of authority is that ministers can command opinion the way they command civil servants: a minister speaks, the department acts, the public follows. That is a fantasy of administration, not a description of it. A rational-legal state does not hold legitimacy as a stock it can spend on behalf of a client. It renews legitimacy through procedure, one consultation and one inquiry at a time, and it can only lend that legitimacy to an outcome the procedure has actually produced.

Here the firms’ position deserves its strongest form, because it is not foolish. They might argue that Britain’s procedures are exactly the problem. The inquiry, the objection period and the judicial review are veto points, and every veto point invites the organised few to delay the many. On this view a datacentre stalled for years in consenting is a national competitive loss, and accelerating the process, perhaps under the banner of critical infrastructure, is simply rational. Speed is a public good, they would say, and procedure is friction.

The answer lies in what the protesters, actual and anticipated, are said to be angry about. It is not the buildings. The grievances named are successive dry summers and rising energy bills, and both are matters of allocation. Who gets water during a drought, and who pays for the new grid connection, are not questions of persuasion. They are questions of rules, and the rules sit with Ofwat, Ofgem, the water companies and the grid operator, none of which has a mandate to put a hyperscale tenant at the front of the queue or to say so in public. Picture a retired man in a Thames Valley village, holding a hosepipe ban letter from his water company in one hand while, on the lamppost outside, a planning notice announces a facility whose cooling arrangements he cannot find described anywhere he is able to read. No ministerial speech will reach him. A clause in a water abstraction licence might.

So the firms have asked for the wrong product. They want a communications outcome; what they need is a distributive settlement, written into regulatory rules and visible on a bill. I offer this as an inference about incentives rather than a claim about motive: a company that asks government to manage opinion has usually concluded that changing the underlying allocation would cost more. That may be correct arithmetic. It may also reflect nothing more sinister than the way commercial organisations are structured, with a government affairs function whose job is to talk to ministers, while nobody’s job is to argue for a lower priority in a drought plan. The department one is staffed to petition determines the request one makes.

There is a small comedy in the deadline itself. Twelve months is the native unit of bureaucracy: the budget cycle, the annual report, the performance review. Placing public anger on a twelve-month timetable treats it as a deliverable with an owner and a milestone. It is rather like issuing a service-level agreement to the weather. The summers will not consult the timetable, and neither will the next round of tariff increases.

The structural prediction follows from the authority type. Ministers, whose instrument is rational-legal, will respond with the tools that instrument provides: designations, accelerated consenting, a strategy document and perhaps a public engagement unit with a cheerful name. Each of these removes a procedural venue where objection could have been absorbed and answered, and so each pushes objection outward into the only venue left, which is the street. The effort to forestall protest by shortening procedure is the most reliable way to produce protest. The firms may get their year. They will spend it watching opposition move from the inquiry room, where it could be heard and answered, to the site gates.

On the lamppost, the planning notice will have been taken down. The hosepipe ban letter will still be on the man’s kitchen table.