A London think tank went through the paperwork on 20 planned UK data centers and put the permanent job count for the pipeline at roughly a quarter of the figure the industry has been giving government. The row that followed was entirely about operations staff. Construction employment, which is where nearly all the work on these sites actually sits, barely came up at all.
On 9 September the think tank Verdant published a briefing that did something nobody in the UK data center argument had bothered to do properly. It pulled planning applications, filed accounts and company announcements for 20 planned sites, checked them against comparable facilities abroad, and counted the jobs. The answer came out at about 10,400 permanent operational roles across the whole planned pipeline by 2035, against the 40,200 that trade body techUK has projected.
The same afternoon, Prime Minister Andy Burnham stood at the despatch box and turned down a call for a national pause on new data centers. The request came from Ian Lavery, the Labour MP for Blyth and Ashington, where three large schemes are proposed around Sleekburn and Cambois. Burnham told the Commons: “At this point, I won’t go as far as a moratorium.”
It would be easy to file this as a Westminster spat. That would be a mistake if your order book touches this pipeline. The jobs number is the strongest card the sector plays in front of planning committees, and it has now been marked down by a factor of four in public, with no agreed method for settling who is right.
What Verdant actually counted
Twenty sites, public filings, and a capacity-weighted average
Verdant is an environmental think tank based in London, co-directed by the economist James Meadway. Its method was deliberately unglamorous. Rather than model the sector, it looked for the 20 planned UK projects where staffing requirements are already sitting in the public domain, mostly buried in planning submissions and company accounts, then sense-checked those against international sites of similar size.
Two headline findings came out of it. UK data centers already built and running support fewer than 4,400 direct permanent jobs, not the 24,300 techUK has claimed. And the pipeline still to be built lands at around 10,400 permanent roles by 2035 rather than 40,200. Both figures cover permanent operational staff and exclude temporary construction work entirely, which Verdant is upfront about.
We’re being rushed into supporting a frantic pace of datacentre buildoutJames Meadway, co-director of Verdant
Worth noting what nobody has done in the week since. Neither techUK nor the government has produced a rival headcount. The pushback has been about whether jobs per megawatt is a fair yardstick, not about the numbers Verdant pulled out of the filings.
Why the two numbers sit so far apart
A 6.35 megawatt template doing work it was never designed for
techUK’s 8.5 jobs per megawatt comes from a model site of 54 staff running 6.35MW of capacity. That ratio then gets applied across the pipeline. Verdant’s objection is that the template describes an older, smaller, more hands-on generation of facility, and the schemes now in planning are nothing like it. They are bigger, heavily automated, and built around dense GPU racks rather than the staff-intensive kit of a decade ago.
Weighted by capacity, the 20 sites Verdant examined average about 1.2 operational jobs per megawatt. Across the full pipeline the briefing uses 1.6, which is what produces the 10,400 figure. On existing sites measured against average load rather than contracted capacity, Verdant gets 8.6 jobs per megawatt where techUK’s numbers imply 43.7. The gap is consistent whichever way you cut it.
- Data centers: 8.6. Verdant’s figure for sites already operating, measured against average load.
- Steelworks: 291. Roughly 34 times the employment intensity per unit of power.
- Car plants: 400. The comparison ministers objected to most loudly.
- Hospitals and medical centers: 3,626. Schools, colleges and universities come out higher still at 4,534.
A government spokesperson called the metric “deeply misleading”, argued the hospital and school comparisons are false ones, and said the analysis confuses electrical capacity with actual consumption. techUK said its own estimates rest on a published methodology and remain “a reasonable estimate” of the sector’s contribution, while criticising the sample size. Both responses are reasonable. Neither produces a different number.
Cambois is the figure that will get quoted
720 megawatts, roughly 400 permanent jobs
One of the 20 sites is the QTS campus at Cambois in Northumberland, the Blackstone-backed scheme converting the former Blyth power station at a reported cost of around £10 billion. It sits in Lavery’s constituency, which is why it ended up at Prime Minister’s Questions. Verdant cites a government response to a Freedom of Information request putting the 720MW campus at about 400 permanent operational jobs.
That works out at 0.56 jobs per megawatt. Run techUK’s ratio over the same site and you would expect north of 6,100. It is the single most quotable line in the briefing and it will turn up in objection letters for the next two years, because it is a specific number attached to a named scheme with a government source behind it.
Lavery spent most of the last year backing the project, calling it great news in October 2025 and still pressing for it in May. His position hardened over the summer. On 7 September he signed Richard Burgon’s early day motion calling for a national pause on new AI data centers.
Both sides left the construction phase out
18,200 roles with nobody putting evidence behind them
Here is the odd part. techUK’s own 2024 analysis had two numbers in it, not one: 40,200 operational jobs between 2025 and 2035, plus 18,200 additional construction roles. Only the first has been argued about. Verdant excluded construction deliberately because it was counting permanent posts. The government defended the operational figure. Nobody picked up the construction number and made the case for it.
Which is strange, because it is the honest version of the argument and it is a much bigger number per site. Peak crew sizes on large data center campuses have moved from around 750 workers to four or five thousand. Electrical work alone accounts for 45 to 70 percent of total data center construction cost. The employment is real, it is well paid, and it lands in exactly the sort of places these sites get built.
The catch is obvious and it is why nobody leads with it. Construction jobs are temporary, so objectors discount them, and there is no published, verified, site-by-site record of how many there are or how many went to local labor. That absence is doing a lot of damage right now. Councils are weighing applications with no agreed measure of benefit at all, which tends to favour whoever shouts loudest.
What this changes if you build or bid this work
Local labor evidence is quietly becoming a planning asset
The practical read is that employment evidence has shifted from a communications exercise to something closer to a consenting risk. Developers who can put verified construction-phase numbers in front of a committee will get through faster than those repeating a trade body ratio that has now been publicly contested.
None of this makes the operational jobs argument recoverable. It probably is not. But the sector has a second argument sitting right there, backed by real payroll, and so far it has not bothered to write it down.
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The two methods side by side
| Measure | techUK | Verdant |
|---|---|---|
| Jobs per MW of capacity | 8.5, from a 54-staff, 6.35MW model site | 1.2 across 20 planned sites, 1.6 applied to the pipeline |
| Jobs per MW of average load, existing sites | 43.7 implied | 8.6 |
| Existing UK direct jobs | 24,300 | Under 4,400 |
| Planned pipeline by 2035 | 40,200 operational | About 10,400 operational |
| Construction roles counted | 18,200, largely undiscussed | Excluded by design |
| Evidence base | Published methodology, standard economic impact technique | 20 sites with public staffing data, plus overseas comparators |
Frequently asked questions
Verdant is a London-based environmental think tank co-directed by economist James Meadway. Its briefing carries weight because it is built from primary documents rather than modelling: planning applications, filed company accounts and public announcements for 20 planned UK sites. No competing headcount has been published in response. (Source)
The 1.2 is the capacity-weighted average across the 20 planned sites where staffing data was available. The 1.6 is the slightly more generous figure applied across the whole UK pipeline to produce the 10,400 headline. Both refer to permanent operational jobs per megawatt of capacity. (Source)
A government spokesperson described the jobs-per-megawatt measure as deeply misleading, objected to benchmarking data centers against hospitals and schools, and said the report appears to confuse electrical capacity with actual consumption. The spokesperson also argued it ignores the wider value of compute and the sovereignty case for hosting it in Britain. (Source)
No, and that is deliberate. Verdant counted permanent operational positions and explicitly excluded temporary construction roles. techUK’s 2024 analysis did include a construction figure of 18,200 roles alongside its operational projection, but that number has played almost no part in the public argument. (Source)
Burnham ruled out a national moratorium, while accepting that host communities need to see the benefit. He pointed to AI Growth Zones and to letting local authorities keep growth in business rates, and argued that a data center can pull other investment in behind it over time. His wording left room to move later. (Source)
Probably, at the margin. There is now a published, specific, government-sourced figure for a flagship site at 0.56 jobs per megawatt that objectors can cite. Verdant also recommends making electricity and water availability a binding condition of consent, which would be a material change to how these applications are assessed. (Source)
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