Planning Permission
The Peelhouses Data Centre and Sustainable Village was a concept that grew from an appraisal of the data centre industry and it’s place in the economy, environment and social structure of both global and UK national communities, in the present and the future.
Lockerbie Data Centres Limited was set up in 2008 to deliver an aspiration for the development of a genuinely sustainable data centre within the context of economic, environmental and social interaction and interdependence. Masterplanners were appointed in the summer of 2008 and by September 2008 a masterplan had been sketched out to describe the physical realisation of the original aspiration. In December 2008 the masterplan was exhibited [the documents referring to the original planning permission document can be found on our media page] to the local community in Lockerbie, and over the period of a week the company and its agents sought the views of local people. These were of a positive nature in the vast majority of cases, and building on the results of that communication exercise, a refined version of the masterplan was developed and re-exhibited in Lockerbie during late February 2008. Concurrently, a total of fifteen consultants were appointed to prepare the required Environmental Impact Assessment, addressing all aspects of the proposed development’s potential effect on the site and its surroundings in terms of building form, landscape, visual impact, ecology, protected species, hydrology, roads and traffic, socio-economic impact and geotechnical suitability.
The Application for Planning Permission in Principle was submitted at the end of March 2009 with a view to convince Dumfries & Galloway Council of the merits of the development. The plan attached [media page] to the application showed a 3,000,000 square foot data centre formed in modular, purpose designed buildings, 600 mixed tenure homes to address an existing need locally for affordable homes and to provide a truly sustainable living environment for the hundreds of new inhabitants that the IT investment would attract, 20,000 square feet of office space to provide business accommodation for the target IT community, 30,000 square feet of commercial horticulture (greenhouses) that could take advantage of reclaimed heat from the data centre to operate throughout the year at higher profit margins than currently possible, and a small visitors centre that would explain the purpose of the development and the part each element would play in contributing to that. The housing development also included community facilities, small-scale local shopping, amenity buildings and spaces and a primary school. All these elements were aimed squarely at achieving sustainability across a broad front, much as achieved 200 years ago at what is now the World Heritage Site at New Lanark. [ http://www.newlanark.org/index2.shtml ]
Negotiations with Dumfries & Galloway Council Development Control Department (Planning) over the next three months established that while sustainability was a Council aspiration, housing in the countryside was a matter of Council Policy, and the proposed sustainable village element of the application was contrary to that policy, (to be fair, this was recognised by LDC at the outset but thought to be worth pursuing,) so that while the Council would support the data centre, business use and horticulture, the presence of the housing within the development would lead to the application being recommended for refusal. It was therefore with regret that the sustainable village was omitted from the application and a new masterplan drawn up to reflect that change and to respond to consultation returns that had been received by Development Control in the interim.
The amended Masterplan [masterplan drawing] and an Environmental Assessment Addendum were submitted to Development Control in September 2009, and following a hectic two months of ‘i’ dotting and ‘t’ crossing was granted Planning Permission in Principle by Dumfries and Galloway Council on the 25th of November 2009. Considering the size, scope and complexity of the application with was a massive achievement by both the Design Team and the Council in such a short space of time.
Footnote: Although it was disappointing to lose the opportunity to take forward a holistically sustainable development, it has to be acknowledged that the masterplan as approved provides for a far simpler, cleaner development as far as the construction and operation of the data centre campus is concerned. The data centre site now enjoys far greater seclusion, and therefore physical security, and the most onerous potential conditions related to the planning permission are now redundant. An element of sustainability is retained through harvested heat from the data centres still being used within the business and horticultural spaces, and the data centres themselves are designed to create the least environmental impact possible for that kind of development.
