My Dagenham and Rainham constituency has a proud industrial past of car and pharmaceutical manufacturing, good quality skilled jobs that people could raise a family on. Sadly, these jobs have all since left the area and my seat has the lowest average wage in London. At the general election I stood on a platform to turn this around and bring good jobs and opportunities back to the area. Earlier this year Eastbrook Film Studios, officially opened by King Charles III, was the first step towards delivering on that promise.
However, with a growing shift towards investing in and expanding AI, the digital economy, and the infrastructure to support it, I have a concern that areas like mine will yet again become dumping grounds for environmentally damaging projects that offer no prospects. Like landfill and gravel extraction, my constituency and other outer London areas now face the emergence of data centres.
Next to my constituency office, on the same site as the film studios, is a 64MW data centre owned by NTT, a Japanese firm. Generally, data centres are sold to communities on the basis of myth, offering ‘local jobs for local people’, which then translates to around 70 positions for operational staff – 10% of the promised 700 skilled jobs.
AI and data centres cannot be our only offer of opportunity to the next generation. Nor can the environmentally damaging consequence of data centres be the price communities pay for better connectivity.
One of the biggest barriers to a revolution in electric vehicle take up, aside from the cost, is the infrastructure. Yes, kerbside charging points, but more importantly the national grid requires significant upgrades to support our switch to an electrified economy. Consider then, that the NTT data centre in Dagenham has an energy consumption equal to the daily usage of every household across my constituency.
Grid expansion and new power plants will require significant capital investment from energy companies, something which would undoubtedly be passed on to the consumer – undermining the governments long-term plan to lower household bills. Yet without this investment, areas home to large data centres could face an increase in frequent power outages.
I believe that if infrastructure upgrades are needed to accommodate the development of data centres, this cost should be shouldered by the company itself. Furthermore, anything not drawn from on-site energy creation, i.e. additional drawdown from the grid, should face a surcharge to further buffer the public from associated energy price increases.
In addition to concerns regarding job opportunities and grid management, large data centres rely on water-based cooling systems to prevent servers from overheating, often using millions of litres per day. As the climate changes, and we have longer dryer spells, this process will become unsustainable and could have a detrimental impact on residential access to water. We only have to look at the flawed private management and maintenance of our existing water system to know that problems are on the horizon – yet further cause to bring utilities back into public ownership in the future.
We also need to understand the long-term environmental impact of water-based cooling systems at this scale. Having spoken to people living near large data centres, concerns have been raised about the effect of water run-off and leachate, coupled with a greater exposure to industrial pollutants, on the surrounding environment.
However, there are innovative uses for some of the by-products storing our data can create. I would argue that where data centres are necessary, infrastructure should be put in place during planning and development to harness the excess heat for residential use. This is one positive way to offset the detrimental impact of having large data centres appearing in towns and cities across the country.
Finally, it is worth noting that you would be hard pressed to name an affluent area that is home to a large data centre, landfill site, energy from waste incinerator, or other industrial processes that have the potential to cause harm to the environment and to human health. We have them all in and around Dagenham and Rainham and I am working hard to bring this to an end; to build a better future for local people.
Whilst I welcomed our first data centre at Dagenham East to support digital growth, I am in constant talks with both The City of London Corporation and the Thames Freeport to develop a lasting legacy in the south of my constituency. This must be a legacy of skilled work, opportunities for local people and environmental sustainability.
Margaret Mullane is the Labour MP for Dagenham and Rainham.
