Scottish Greens co-leader Ross Greer will use his party’s opposition-day debate to force MSPs to back or reject a pause on new applications until the Scottish government publishes a national strategy and criteria for assessing which projects should be allowed to proceed. The motion has the backing of the SNP’s National Council and, according to reporting from Daily Business, some SNP MSPs themselves, putting first minister John Swinney in the position of resisting a policy his own party’s grassroots have endorsed.
Opponents of the current approach argue the scale of the pipeline makes the case for itself. If the 24 outstanding hyperscale applications now before Scottish planning authorities were approved, they would draw around 1.5 times as much electricity as the whole of Scotland currently uses at peak, according to figures cited by the Greens.
Scottish Green MSP Patrick Harvie framed Wednesday’s vote as binary: MSPs will be “forcing the Scottish Government to make a very simple choice” between a pause and continuing to let speculative applications pile up without a national strategy.
The Scottish government has so far resisted a full freeze. In August it introduced a rule requiring planning authorities to notify ministers of data centre applications within seven days of validation, a measure Greer has dismissed as notification rather than strategy. The Scottish government has separately warned that a moratorium on hyperscale developments could be unlawful, in a formal response to a Holyrood public petition, PE2233, that has gathered more than 24,500 signatures.
A UK-wide pattern, not a Scottish one
The Holyrood vote lands in the middle of a wider UK argument that Capacity has tracked since July, when the SNP’s National Council first passed a motion calling for a freeze on new Scottish data centres pending government consideration.
At Westminster, prime minister Andy Burnham ruled out a UK-wide moratorium on 9 September, telling MPs that “at this point I won’t go as far as a moratorium” while stressing that host communities need to see tangible benefits from data centre investment. His comments were a direct response to Labour MP Ian Lavery, who raised concerns about three “vast” data centres being built in his northeastern England constituency.
The Green Party of England and Wales has taken the opposite position at national level. Leader Zack Polanski wants large new developments paused, with an exemption for smaller, local-scale facilities, alongside mandatory reporting of water and electricity consumption. Polanski has argued the UK needs “not more chatbots at any cost” while hosepipe bans and housebuilding delays compete with data centres for grid connections.
Both positions were tested on 28 August, when the UK government formally rejected a moratorium on new large data centre approvals, according to construction-sector analysis. That decision came 11 days after a revised National Planning Policy Framework strengthened planning support for data centres and AI Growth Zones, reinforcing the direction Capacity flagged in its look at whether Britain is really backing the sites it approves.
The constraint politics can’t legislate away
Regardless of where the moratorium argument lands, grid capacity remains the more immediate bottleneck. NESO figures put data centre connection requests at more than 70GW against roughly 5.2GW of currently connected capacity, a mismatch Capacity has covered in detail through Ofgem’s proposed Data Centre Commitment Fee, designed to clear speculative projects from a queue that grew from 41GW to 125GW in seven months to June 2025.
Water is emerging as a parallel constraint alongside power. England’s drought position underpins much of the campaigning behind the moratorium calls: as of late August, 71% of the country by land area was classified as in drought, average reservoir storage had fallen below 60%, and around 30 million people were under temporary water-use restrictions. A separate report found 84% of proposed UK data centre developments are planned in water-stressed areas, part of a wider shift documented in the hidden constraint now stalling data centre build-out globally.
What Wednesday’s vote actually changes
A Holyrood vote in favour of the Greens’ motion would not itself have legal force over planning decisions, which remain with local authorities and the Scottish government. But it would be the clearest parliamentary signal yet that opposition to the current approach extends beyond the Greens and into the SNP’s own base, adding pressure on Swinney ahead of any future legislative or planning-policy response. techUK has previously warned that government AI ambitions do not yet “go far enough” to resolve grid and planning barriers; a moratorium vote, even one that fails, adds a political cost to that unresolved gap.
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