Thursday 12 November 7pm

Hyrbrid meeting –  Friends Meeting House, Mount Street, Manchester M1, online register:  bit.ly/NoMoreDataCentres

Speaker: Duncan Chapel (RedMole.org). 

They didn’t ask anyone in Manchester either

AN APPLICATION went in to the city council in August for a “neural edge” data centre off Bower Street in Newton Heath. Two buildings, a three-acre brownfield site, finished by 2030. Reference PLA-2026-001350.

Three weeks before that, the government was asked to pause approvals in England until the environmental rules caught up. The request came from the Green Party. It was refused inside three days, and a government spokesperson said a pause “would be a disaster for jobs and national security”.

Ask what is running inside these buildings and nobody in government knows. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has admitted, answering a freedom of information request, that it holds no information on who uses the largest UK data centres, or what for. They were designated critical national infrastructure in 2024 anyway, which makes them very hard for a council to refuse.

The obvious answer is that this is all about AI. That is not quite right either. The centre approved in east London this summer, over the council’s objection, is there because it sits close enough to the City for traders to shave milliseconds off their transactions. It will draw about 5.2 megawatts, the electricity used by fifteen thousand homes. Six of its flats were for social rent, in a borough with thirty thousand households waiting.

If you have just started at the university, you will meet all of this as a bill, a damp room and a landlord who does not answer emails. Data centres sit in the same queue as housing, hospitals and transport for grid connections and for water, and they have been given a place near the front.

A moratorium is a demand about time. The question underneath it is who decides.

Stopping the next application buys a few months. It does not settle who the grid is being built for, and we pay for that grid.

We are not against computing

Hospitals need it. So does climate science, which is how we know what is coming. The objection is to who owns it, where it goes and what it is for. A building whose purpose is to make share trades marginally faster is not infrastructure. It is a private machine plugged into a public grid.

There is a better way, and it is not complicated. Wind farms in Scotland are paid to switch off when the cables running south are full. Put publicly owned computing next to that wasted power, and run the waste heat into homes and swimming pools. Move the bits, not the electrons. The technology exists. The ownership does not.

Develop a programme for energy reduction

Not every kilowatt can be found. Some of it has to be given up. That is the unpopular half of the argument, and degrowth is the word for it: stop expanding the things that wreck us, from advertising to arms to speculative computing, so there is power left for housing, health and transport. Insulate the housing stock, electrify the buses, and the demand curve comes down on its own. A city that knows how much energy it has can plan what to spend it on. Nobody publishes that total, so nobody can.

They will offer you construction jobs

A data centre employs very few people once it is running. The work is in building it, which is real work and badly needed, and there are people in this city who need that contract. They could equally be building council homes, retrofitting the housing stock and rewiring the hospitals, and their union is entitled to ask why those jobs are not on offer instead. Jobs against the climate is a trap. We refuse it.

What we are asking for

• No new data centre in Greater Manchester until the council can say what it is for, what it will draw and who pays for the grid connection.
• End critical national infrastructure status for commercial data centres. Homes first. Hospitals first. Schools first.
• Publish the power and water figures with every application, before the decision, not after.
• Public ownership of the computing we actually need, sited where renewable power is currently being wasted, with the heat going into housing.
• Union recognition, decent pay and retraining on every site, decided with the workers who build and run them.
• A published energy and carbon budget for Greater Manchester, spent by public decision. Data hall or hospital is a political choice, and it is ours to make.

If you are in the Green Party, or you signed the petition

Your leadership made the moratorium argument in August and lost nothing on the facts. The government refused it in three days, because the decision is not made in the place where the argument happens. So the question is not whether the argument is right. It is what force makes them act on it.

We think that force is built from tenants, students, trade unionists and campaign groups who find out they are in the same fight. Manchester Friends of the Earth want a ban until environmental safeguards exist, and we will work with anyone who wants to stop these approvals. We will also argue, inside that work, for the bit most people stop short of: an economy planned around what people need and owned in common, which is what ecosocialism means when you take the word apart.

The part we cannot answer yet

Building all of this takes years. The atmosphere is not interested in that, and neither is the committee that will decide Bower Street long before any movement is ready. We do not have a good answer to the speed problem, and anyone who tells you they do on a leaflet is selling something. What we have is a room on 12 November and an application to fight in the meantime.