The little UK town's that's become Britain's fastest growing pollution hotspot

A UK town less than 20 miles from London has had a steep increase in commercial emissions over the past two decades, prompting alarm from local politicians. Slough, in Berkshire, was found to have seen a whopping 52% rise since 2005, way above the figures seen for a number of traditional industrial areas, according to the latest government data on the country's local and regional greenhouse gas stats for 2005 to 2023.

According to the report, published by the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero (DESNZ) "all but one of the 361 local authority areas have seen a reduction in emissions from the commercial sector since 2005". The department said the long-term drop is "largely driven by the reduced emissions from electricity use," itself largely "due to decreased coal use for electricity generation and increased use of renewables".

Slough was the exception, with DSNZ saying the rise "may be due to the large number of data centres that have been built there".

Slough is though to have more than 30 of these data centres, and is one of the biggest hubs for the technology in Europe.

Data centres are a key part of the digital economy, supporting various services like streaming platforms and online banking. They're also important for AI amid a boom in the industry.

Slough is thought to be a prime location for these vast banks of servers due to its proximity to its fast fibre optic connections, and close proximity to both the capital, and Heathrow Airport.

According to analysis by The Telegraph of the data, which comes from accredited official statistics, Slough's total commercial emissions were at 183,000 tonnes of CO2 at the start of the recorded period, and had risen by almost 100,000 tonnes to 280,000 in 2023.

During that time, the entire North East of England saw these kind of emissions drop from 2.9m tonnes to 960,000 tonnes.

The report said the North East of England "was the region with the largest proportional fall in emissions over this period, at 67%, in part due to industrial closures".

However, the report notes that no local authority areas were recorded as having an increase in total, industry sector, or domestic sector emissions.

Among the major findings were that between 2022 and 2023, "greenhouse gas emissions decreased in 94% (340) of the 361 local authority areas in the UK", which is "consistent with the decrease seen in overall UK emissions in 2023".

The data excludes emissions excluded from aviation, shipping and military transport "for which there is no obvious basis for allocation to local areas", the department says.

Dexter Smith, the Conservative leader of Slough Council, told the newspaper he would be "devastated if the explanation for this data was down to Slough's high concentration of data centres...We have 31 data centres with more on the way".

"Planning applications will have to comply with operating requirements that include stringent control of emissions and being carbon neutral," he added.

Venessa Moffat, executive director of The Data Centre Alliance, the industry trade body, told the Telegraph that the problem is the strain on the system caused by people rather than the tech itself.

"Slough offers access to one of the largest business and financial ecosystems in the world without the real estate costs and power constraints of central London," she told The Telegraph.

"Every text sent, app downloaded, or movie streamed uses IT housed in data centres. But it's not data centres that pollute - it's the demand that we, as human beings, put on our digital infrastructure."