What 7,000 Objections at Larbert Tell You About Building Data Centres in the UK

Larbert is a town in the Falkirk council area with a regional hospital, a business park, and now a planning application for one of the largest single electricity loads ever proposed in Scotland. Apatura DC Project 5 Ltd wants full permission for two data center buildings drawing 300MW continuously, on a site of roughly 19 hectares beside Glenbervie Business Park on Bellsdyke Road.

More than 7,000 objections have been lodged. That is a remarkable figure for a town that size, and it triggered a pre-determination hearing at The Plaza in Larbert High School on 16 September, starting at 6pm and livestreamed. The developer and objectors both get to address councillors directly before any decision is made. No vote happens that evening, and the application returns to a later Planning Committee meeting for determination.

The instinct in the industry is to file this under local opposition and move on. That would be a mistake. Larbert is one of around 19 data center schemes moving through Scottish planning authorities, and reportedly the only one carrying a full Environmental Impact Assessment, which happened because Falkirk’s officers insisted on it. This is where the rulebook for UK hyperscale consenting gets written.

What is actually being decided

A hearing is not a vote, and the distinction matters

Scottish planning law requires a pre-determination hearing for major developments of national or significant local importance, so the applicant and objectors can put their case to the committee rather than relying on a written report alone. Committee members cannot signal a position in advance without disqualifying themselves from the eventual vote, which is why the evening will produce a lot of argument and no outcome.

What it does produce is a public record. Everything raised on 16 September becomes material the authority has to address, and material any future Scottish applicant will be asked about. If you are preparing a submission anywhere in the central belt, the objections aired that night are your pre-mortem.

The numbers everyone is arguing about

Investment and jobs claims depend heavily on how you count

Apatura says the scheme would bring close to £1bn of direct capital investment to Scotland, support more than 5,000 construction jobs and more than 1,300 long-term skilled roles, over 500 of them local positions at a predicted average salary of £56,000. An earlier company statement put total capital investment at around £2.1bn, a different measure of a different thing, and that gap is what objectors have seized on.

The employment figures come from an independent Economic Impact Assessment by analysts Glic, using a methodology the Scottish Government also uses. Apatura’s CEO has since described the construction figure differently again, as more than 10,000 net job years with nearly 2,000 fulfilled locally. Job years and jobs are not the same unit, and a reader who does not know that will misjudge the scheme in either direction.

Michael Maciocia, a retired technology worker leading the campaign, has argued Apatura will not operate the site itself and therefore cannot know its staffing needs. That is a fair challenge to any developer-led operational jobs forecast, and one the industry should expect at every hearing from here on.

The objections are not really about the building

Power, water, diesel and a hospital 500 meters away

Read the objections and a pattern emerges that has almost nothing to do with massing or elevations. The 300MW continuous draw works out at roughly 2.6TWh a year, comparable to a large power station, and campaigners argue that pressure lands on consumer bills. Around 200 diesel generators are proposed for back-up, which Stop Climate Chaos Scotland has framed as a conflict with Scotland’s emissions trajectory. Water use is contested despite the closed-loop cooling design. And the site sits a few hundred meters from Forth Valley Royal Hospital, with a care home closer still.

The council also commissioned an independent technical review from AECOM, which identified inconsistencies and outstanding questions across the application documents, covering floorspace, parking, construction timescales, employment estimates, back-up generation and the battery storage connection. AECOM also noted that the principal documents expected at this scale had been submitted and that clarification requests are normal. Both halves of that are true and both are being quoted selectively.

Scottish Water offered no objection while stressing that drinking water for existing homes and businesses takes priority and that its response does not guarantee a connection. That is a statutory consultee declining to block a scheme while carefully declining to endorse it, which is worth reading closely if you are drafting a utilities strategy for a similar site.

What to take from this if you are building or bidding

The consenting risk has moved upstream

Two years ago the binding constraint on a UK data center was a grid connection. Larbert has one, anchored on Denny, plus a consented battery site nearby and Scottish Enterprise as landowner. What it does not have is community consent, which has turned out to be the harder thing to secure.

The practical read is that the documentation standard has risen. An EIA that Falkirk’s officers had to insist on is now the baseline expectation. Employment claims will be audited by people who understand the difference between a job and a job year, back-up generation counts will be read as an emissions statement, and an independent technical review picking at inconsistencies is a normal step rather than a worst case.

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