Buckinghamshire backs six data halls with no stated power

A collapsed film-studio proposal in Buckinghamshire has put a six-hall data center consent within reach, after the council's Strategic Sites Committee recommended approval for 13 hectares south of Wycombe Air Park subject to planning conditions and a legal agreement covering travel-plan monitoring, a speed survey, a speed-limit reduction order and a damage-cost contribution to mitigate air pollution. The site had been proposed as an eight-stage film studio by Stage Fifty, which collapsed in April 2024; it passed to Wycombe Film Studios, now Wycombe Park Ltd, and was shifted to data center use after the county council judged a film studio unlikely to progress on commercial and funding grounds.

The economic statement filed with the application put construction at around 2,200 temporary local jobs and operations at 1,027 full-time roles, while the council's own recommendation suggested an operational workforce of approximately 300 full-time equivalents and said as much in the record: lower than might be expected from alternative employment-generating uses on an allocated strategic employment site, though the proposal would still provide an employment function and economic benefits through construction and operations. That gap is worth sitting with. Data halls are capital-heavy and labour-light, which is why an employment allocation absorbs them comfortably: the capital lands and the headcount does not.

Consent rather than capital, as this publication has argued, decides the data center buildout in constrained markets, and Wycombe sharpens the point: the committee called data center use acceptable given the site's allocation as a strategic employment area, and the objections it weighed — highway safety, aviation operations at the nearby air park, air quality, light, noise, and the site's potential impact on the Chilterns National Landscape — were judged controllable by condition. Consent comes cheapest where land has already been surrendered to development once, which means the UK's next tranche of capacity is likely to be built on recycled allocations: a collapsed studio, former industrial parcels, any plot a committee has already accepted in principle.

Missing from that approval is the part that makes a data hall a business: the record does not say how much power the site can draw, whether a grid connection is in hand, who will operate the halls, or whether a tenant has signed. Those are the underwriting facts, and until they surface, Wycombe is a six-hall consent rather than an income-producing asset — a hyperscaler anchor sets infrastructure pricing, while capacity without contracted cash flow is a merchant shell until a lease proves otherwise. Thirty-two acres are approved; nothing yet says what feeds them.

Watch for an operator name and a megawatt figure, and watch the conditions: travel-plan monitoring, a speed survey, a speed-limit order and a pollution payment are live obligations attached to a project whose commercial case is still undisclosed.