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An FOI answer credits a 720-megawatt data centre campus with 400 permanent jobs
Verdant traced operational headcount through the planning files of 20 planned UK sites and got 1.2 jobs per megawatt against techUK's 8.5, on the day Andy Burnham told the Commons he would not pause consent.
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What happened
- Prime Minister Andy Burnham told the House of Commons on 9 September that at this point he would not go as far as a moratorium, after Labour MP Ian Lavery asked him to pause new data centres.
- The same day, the think tank Verdant published a briefing projecting about 10,400 permanent operational jobs from planned UK data centres by 2035, against techUK's forecast of 40,200 for the same period.
- TechUK told CNBC that Verdant used an unreliably small sample, and a government spokesperson called the jobs-per-megawatt metric deeply misleading.
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Why it matters
- contradiction The government calls the jobs-per-megawatt metric deeply misleading, yet the lowest ratio in the briefing, 0.56 at Cambois, is calculated from the government's own FOI answer.
- capability Objectors at a named site now have a per-site number sourced from the applicant's own file, so a committee argument can turn on that scheme's headcount instead of a trade body ratio.
- decision No pause means each scheme is judged on its own documents. The local benefit Burnham named is retained growth in business rates under AI Growth Zones, and councils weighing that against a jobs forecast now have two forecasts to pick from.
- precedent Verdant's second ask, making electricity and water availability a binding condition of consent, would put utility headroom into decisions that currently trade on jobs and rates.
Cambois is where the ratio argument meets a document. Verdant cites a government response to a Freedom of Information request putting permanent operational staff at the 720-megawatt QTS campus at about 400, which is 0.56 jobs per megawatt [14]. TechUK's ratio applied to the same campus would have predicted more than 6,100, according to Verdant [15]. The government's own answer is about a fifteenth of that [4].
The two events connect through one constituency. Bloomberg reported that Ian Lavery raised three "vast" data centres being built in his north-east England seat, and 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 [23]. Burnham said data centres "can be the magnet that clusters in other investment over time" [5].
TechUK's 8.5 jobs per megawatt comes from a typical site of 54 staff and 6.35 megawatts [10]. The Cambois campus is about 113 times that capacity [2]. Verdant's position is that the reference figure reflects older, smaller data centres [11], and its own count, traced through planning documents, company filings and press releases for 20 planned sites, averages 1.2 operational jobs per megawatt weighted by capacity [12]. That is about a seventh of techUK's ratio [3].
Verdant then applies 1.6 jobs per megawatt across the whole pipeline to reach 10,400, which is 26% of techUK's 40,200 [13][1]. Those two numbers imply a pipeline of roughly 6,500 megawatts [5]. Run techUK's own 8.5 across 6,500 megawatts and the answer is about 55,000, well above its published forecast, which works out at 6.2 jobs per megawatt on that capacity [6].
The other set of figures is the one the government went after by name. Verdant compares direct jobs per megawatt of average electricity load: 8.6 for existing data centres on its count, 47.3 on techUK's, against 291 for steelworks, 400 for car plants, 3,626 for hospitals and 4,534 for schools, colleges and universities [16]. A government spokesperson told CNBC that the 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" [20]. The spokesperson also said it "discounts the wider economic value of compute and the national security and sovereignty case" for building digital infrastructure in Britain [21].
TechUK told CNBC that "Verdant offers its own employment estimate using an unreliably small sample size" [18], and 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" [19]. Verdant answers the sample point inside the briefing, putting its 20 sites at about 28% of the pipeline [22].
The method travels to a single application better than the national total does. For anyone who has to defend one campus at committee, the numbers that matter are already in the applicant's submission: nameplate megawatts, permanent operational headcount at full build, and peak construction headcount with the date it ends. Divide the headcount by the megawatts and set it beside the 1.2 average from Verdant's 20 sites [12]. Where the submission names no operational headcount, the 8.5 ratio is what fills the gap [10], and the highest-capacity site in the briefing comes out at 0.56 [14].
What to watch
- Whether QTS's own planning submissions carry the same 400 permanent operational jobs the government's FOI answer gives for Cambois.
- Whether techUK publishes a site-level headcount count to answer the 1.2 jobs per megawatt figure or restates its 8.5 ratio.
- Whether any council in an AI Growth Zone attaches an operational headcount condition to a data centre consent.