Angela Rayner hit with legal challenge over datacentre on green belt land

Exclusive: Campaigners complain no environmental assessment made for 90MW Buckinghamshire facility

The deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, has been hit with a legal challenge after she overruled a local council to approve a hyperscale datacentre on green belt land by the M25 in Buckinghamshire.

Campaigners bringing the action are complaining that no environmental impact assessment was made for the 90MW datacentre, which was approved as part of the Labour government's push to turn the UK into an AI powerhouse by trebling computing capacity to meet rising demand amid what it terms a global race" as AI usage takes off.