Summary

  • Freedom-of-information documents show Torridge district council and Xlinks began closed pre-application discussions in March 2025 and exchanged an April 2025 letter of in-principle support more than a year before the 1.5GW datacentre and 1.8GW battery storage proposal near Great Torrington was publicly announced, establishing a procedural track whose credibility deficit cannot be recovered by subsequent public-facing activity.
  • The pre-application sequence — including an 18 December 2025 council-developer email asking “Who do we all feel it is critical to get onboard and when both locally and further afield?” — reads most consistently under a pre-judgment reading as officers coordinating stakeholder mobilisation rather than testing whether the project should proceed.
  • The project’s volumetric water assumption runs into a drought-induced regulatory ceiling: north Devon remains under a hosepipe ban after the summer reported as the hottest on record, while a superseded FoI-revealed design acknowledged up to approximately 2.9 billion litres of annual consumption under “extreme conditions.”
  • Campaign coalitions have aligned across place-protection, fairness-perception and policy-coherence axes — Devon Datacentre and BESS action group concerns over water, PFAS, air, noise and fire risk; Devon county councillor Cheryl Cottle-Hunkin’s 30,000-signature petition targeting projects outside AI growth zones; and US activist Elizabeth Humphreys’ linkage of the Devon fight to a permanent Coachella, California datacentre ban.
  • Monkleigh parish council’s 18 September refusal of a closed meeting with Coast Communications, on the grounds that minutes and recordings would not be made public, has converted the project’s dependence on closed-door engagement with parish-layer local government into a documented near-term delivery failure.

Freedom-of-information requests filed by the Devon Datacentre and BESS action group have surfaced documents showing that Torridge district council and Xlinks began closed pre-application discussions in March 2025 and issued a letter of “in-principle support” in April 2025 — more than a year before the £13.8 billion proposal for a 1.5GW AI datacentre and 1.8GW battery energy storage system near Great Torrington was first announced to the public this summer. The 344-hectare site sits inside a UNESCO biosphere reserve in rolling countryside whose history includes a 1646 battle in the first English civil war; five buildings between 50 and 130 feet tall, two structures each measuring 335 metres by 267 metres, and 1,720 containerised battery units would, campaigners said, dwarf Britain’s largest operational battery facility, the 100MW Bramley site in Hampshire. The FoI record places the binding constraint on the proposal in the procedural posture of its promoters rather than in its technical specifications, and the procedural posture is now the principal object of national media scrutiny following The Guardian’s reporting on 27 September 2026.

The FoI record and its decision point

Three documentary items from the action group’s FoI submissions anchor the procedural complaint. First, council officials and Xlinks began bilaterally held closed discussions in March 2025 — a date that, given the proposal’s public announcement only this summer, places the council in pre-application contact with the developer roughly fifteen months before any environmental statement was in the public domain. Second, in April 2025 the council issued the letter of in-principle support, again ahead of public consultation and before any planning application. Third, an email dated 18 December 2025 records council officials and developers discussing links with a sixth-form college in Exeter and a stakeholder engagement plan, and asking: “Who do we all feel it is critical to get onboard and when both locally and further afield?”

A Torridge district council spokesperson told The Guardian that the pre-application process was “standard practice and confidential” and said the in-principle letter was not confirmation of any proposal but was intended to offer “guidance on whether a proposal was acceptable in principle in planning terms.” Emily Clark of the Devon Datacentre and BESS action group drew the opposite conclusion from the same documents. “How can the largest and most costly infrastructure proposal in the nation be conducted almost exclusively in secret?” Clark said. Clark also said the email exchanges and private meetings spanning the past 18 months revealed some officers treating the project as a foregone conclusion, and that genuine dialogue had been “nonexistent” since Xlinks’ June town hall meeting.

The two readings of the same FoI material — standard pre-application confidentiality on one side, officer-level pre-judgment on the other — converge on the documentary record but diverge on the inferences drawn from it. The analytical question is which reading the documentary record better fits, and on that question the April 2025 letter does most of the work. A letter of in-principle support, issued more than a year before any environmental assessment or public consultation, is not a step that follows naturally from a process whose stated purpose is to weigh community input; it is consistent with bilateral developer-council coordination that has moved past the question of whether the proposal is acceptable in principle and on to the question of how it is delivered.

The pre-judgment reading versus routine engagement

Two readings of the FoI record can be constructed. Under the first, the March 2025 onset of closed meetings, the April 2025 letter and the December 2025 stakeholder email are all consistent with standard council practice for major infrastructure applications; the controversy is an artefact of FoI disclosure timing, not of substantive officer conduct. Under the second, the same documents record a substantive shift in planning posture, with officers treating the project as a foregone conclusion and coordinating Xlinks’ external engagement rather than testing whether the project should proceed at all.

The first reading is consistent with the documents but is the kind of straw-in-the-wind evidence that does not by itself discriminate: stakeholder-mapping enquiries of the kind visible in the December 2025 email are part of routine pre-application engagement. The second reading is supported by the conjunction of the three documentary items. A bilaterally held closed meeting track of fifteen months’ duration, terminating in an in-principle support letter issued before environmental assessment, and continuing into shared stakeholder coordination, is a sequence that the routine-engagement reading does not naturally predict and that the pre-judgment reading does. The April 2025 letter is the load-bearing document: the council’s own characterisation of it as indicative and non-binding is consistent with both readings and does not by itself discriminate, but its issuance at that stage of the process is conduct from which the routine-engagement reading would predict restraint.

The full content of the April 2025 letter and the complete record of pre-application meetings between March 2025 and the public announcement are not in the current documentary record. Without that material, the procedural complaint is supported more strongly than a coordination-of-stakeholder-mapping framing alone: the FoI documents establish that closed interactions occurred and that the council’s characterisation of them does not fully match the action group’s characterisation, but they do not on their own resolve whether those interactions represented standard practice or pre-judgment. Council chair Doug Bushby’s threat to call the police over “unsubstantiated and unfounded allegations, abuse, harassment and intimidation” is consistent with an authority defending itself against a process critique, but is itself too ambiguous to discriminate between the readings.

Water, drought and the externalities surface

The project’s technical claims have a separate credibility track. Xlinks said the data campus will be self-sufficient in water terms, recirculating water to absorb heat and topping up mainly from rainwater. A freedom-of-information response acknowledged that under “extreme conditions” — described as “severe heatwaves and serious droughts” — annual water consumption could reach approximately 2.9 billion litres. Xlinks told The Guardian that this figure was based on a superseded design “to be released during public consultation and in the planning application.” North Devon remains under a hosepipe ban after the summer reported as the hottest on record; under those conditions a design whose water consumption under extreme conditions approaches 2.9 billion litres annually is, on the documentary record, a design whose volumetric assumptions the planning process will have to test directly.

The externalities surface extends beyond water. Opponents have raised concerns about wastewater runoff potentially containing PFAS — “forever chemicals” — air pollution, background noise, and the “safety and fire risks associated with a battery storage facility of this scale.” The substrate does not show that these concerns have been matched to a regulatory pathway in which they are addressed. The council’s pre-application process has not been framed as the venue at which the externalities would be settled, and the postponed July public consultation — now rescheduled for later in the year — has not been described as one that will resolve the regulatory questions the action group has flagged. If the new water design is materially similar to the superseded one, the north Devon hosepipe ban becomes a direct obstacle.

The coalition that has formed

Three distinct interests have aligned against the proposal. The Devon Datacentre and BESS action group’s substantive concerns cover water consumption, PFAS runoff, air pollution, background noise and the safety and fire risks of a battery storage facility of this scale; its procedural concerns run to the FoI record; and its relational concerns are anchored in landscape identity tied to 850 acres of north Devon farmland and the UNESCO biosphere designation. Clark said: “We’re facing the biggest construction proposal of its kind in the UK, and for that matter, in Europe. It would not only annihilate 850 acres of prime north Devon farmland and breathtaking countryside — an ecological gem — but have massive repercussions for the entire region.”

Devon county councillor Cheryl Cottle-Hunkin’s petition, which organisers report has drawn 30,000 signatures, expresses the policy-coherence interest directly. “Proposals like this outside AI growth zones are highly problematic, because they may seek to evade regulation and government scrutiny,” Cottle-Hunkin said. She called for “an urgent national conversation on AI and associated infrastructure to make sure it’s on the right scale and in the right place.”

US activist Elizabeth Humphreys of Not in My Valley, addressing a Great Torrington public meeting, supplied a transnational framing anchored in her own record of helping to achieve a permanent datacentre ban in Coachella, California, over concerns about air pollution, water and energy use. “We’re fighting the largest companies that have ever existed in the world, and that is scary but we are all fighting this together,” Humphreys said. “This is a global issue; we are all connected. People across the world are standing up and fighting back.”

The convergence is unusual. The place-protection interest (biosphere conservation, water resources, landscape) and the procedural-fairness interest (the FoI record) are aligned but distinct; the policy-coherence interest (location outside designated AI growth zones) is aligned with both but is also aimed at the regulatory architecture rather than at Xlinks’ specific project. The Coachella linkage supplies a precedent frame — permanent local prohibition on data infrastructure — that the Great Torrington coalition now has visible recourse to.

The parish-layer signal and the council’s defence

The Monkleigh parish council refused on 18 September a closed-meeting request from Coast Communications, Xlinks’ public-relations firm, on the grounds that minutes should be made public and a recording released. The council’s statement said: “As a result … Monkleigh parish council will not be accepting the invitation from Coast Communications on behalf of Xlinks to a closed meeting with them and therefore no meeting will be taking place.” The refusal converts a delivery pathway that depended on closed-door engagement with parish-layer local government into a documented near-term failure.

Tensions at the council tier escalated this week. Protesters rallied outside a Torridge district council meeting and demanded answers about secrecy and due diligence. Bushby responded by threatening to call the police over “unsubstantiated and unfounded allegations, abuse, harassment and intimidation.” Bushby said that when planning applications were received, “they will be dealt with within the same legislative, professional and operational boundaries that exist for all planning applications.” A Torridge district council spokesperson said Xlinks had planned to undertake a public consultation in July, but this was postponed until later in the year: “When any proposals are received these will be validated and details will be published on the council’s planning portal … We appreciate that this proposal will understandably continue to generate a lot of local interest.”

The council’s defence rests on the routine character of pre-application confidentiality and the procedural integrity of the eventual planning determination. The action group’s complaint rests on the FoI record and on the absence of any counter-record — a public-facing record of pre-application exchanges — against which the routine characterisation can be tested. The two defences do not yet meet on a common factual basis; whether they do depends on whether the rescheduled consultation produces that common factual basis or substitutes for it. A delivery pathway that depends on closed-door engagement with parish-layer local government has, on the documentary record, a documented near-term failure regardless of which reading of the FoI record is correct.

The national policy backdrop

The procedural dispute is occurring against an unsettled national policy framework. The UK government estimates the country requires 23–27GW of battery capacity by 2030 to meet its clean power goals, a figure described in official communications as a “very significant level of increase.” Research by the House of Commons Library, cited in The Guardian’s reporting, finds the government does not hold data on the projected land use required for the expansion, has no specific policies for location, and has no definitive estimate of the number of operational BESS facilities or their current total capacity. A spokesperson for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said: “Every battery storage facility we build helps protect families from future energy shocks. We have commissioned the national energy system operator to develop the first ever strategic spatial energy plan, which will support a more actively planned approach to energy projects, to bring good jobs to communities and help to lower bills.”

The structural condition is one in which a developer proposing a 1.8GW battery facility inside a UNESCO biosphere reserve is making its case against a planning backdrop that, on the Library’s research, cannot yet specify where comparable facilities should go. The campaigners’ framing of a “regulatory wild west” and Cottle-Hunkin’s reference to projects that “may seek to evade regulation and government scrutiny” converge on the same observation: a project of this scale is being moored to a planning regime that is itself about to change. The first ever strategic spatial energy plan, commissioned from the national energy system operator, is the policy instrument into which the location decision will eventually be retrofitted; that retrofitting is itself a failure surface, and a project sited within a UNESCO biosphere has the most to lose from the retrofitted regime’s eventual location criteria.

Decision points still on the table

The pathway from the FoI-surfaced April 2025 letter to a visible failure runs: closed-door endorsement before environmental impact assessment → FoI exposure → national media coverage → cross-border activist attention and a 30,000-signature petition → parish-layer refusal of closed meetings → escalation in which the council chair threatens police involvement. The leading indicators of incipient failure are, on the documentary record, already observable: the parish-level refusal of closed meetings, the petition’s reach, and the FoI-revealed December 2025 internal correspondence being publishable at all.

Several mitigation actions remain available. The superseded water design could be replaced with a published design before the rescheduled consultation, allowing the volumetric assumption to be tested against the hosepipe-ban condition rather than after it. The closed-meeting pathway could be widened to recorded public meetings, reversing the Monkleigh refusal and re-engaging parish-layer local government. The project’s location decision could be positioned inside the spatial energy plan that the national energy system operator has been commissioned to develop, addressing the policy-coherence concern before it crystallises into the regulatory framework that the project will then have to satisfy.

Xlinks’ stated position combines economic, relational and procedural interests: a £13.8 billion investment, between 600 and 1,200 jobs, clean energy infrastructure tied to the 2024 Morocco-to-Devon subsea cable proposal that the UK government declined to support, and language about working “collaboratively” and designing the campus “sensitively for local people and the environment.” The company said: “We are carrying out nature and wildlife surveys on site. We must legally improve biodiversity by at least 10%, and plan to exceed this by some margin. Buildings will be sited to minimise visibility, through topography, landscaping and the existing treeline.” Xlinks said an environmental impact assessment is under way and any mitigation required would be built into the design and secured through planning conditions.

The action group’s substantive complaints have not been answered on the documentary record. The procedural complaint has been answered only by the council’s own characterisation of its conduct, which is contradicted by the action group’s characterisation of the same documents. The structural condition in which this proposal now sits is a planning regime being designed retrospectively around a project that has already been moored to a closed-door procedural track. On the documentary record available, the binding constraint is procedural rather than technical. The decision points still on the table are the rescheduled consultation’s design, the council’s posture toward the FoI record, and the spatial energy plan’s eventual treatment of biosphere-adjacent sites.

Analytical techniques used in this piece

This analysis applies the methods below. Each links to a short, plain-English explainer you can read and reuse.

Interest Mapping
Separates parties’ stated positions from their underlying interests (Fisher & Ury).
Pre-Mortem (Action Plan)
Imagines the plan has already failed, then works backward to find out why.
Process Tracing
Reconstructs the step-by-step causal pathway of a specific historical event.