MINISTERS must “slam the brakes” on data centres as communities risk water shortages, Green Party leader Zack Polanski demanded today.

Stricter environmental rules should be introduced and locals should have a greater say on whether these centres are built in their areas, Mr Polanski said while on a visit to the site of a proposed data centre in east London.

“We need to slam the brakes on these energy-guzzling, water-guzzling data centres,” he told the BBC.

“Essentially, we need basically a moratorium other than local-scale data centres for the local community. At a time when three-quarters of the country are in drought, it is outrageous that these are being considered critical infrastructure.”

Tech justice and climate campaigners echoed these warnings, as the government pledged not to give Big Tech a “blank cheque” but maintained that a moratorium on new data centres would be a “disaster for jobs and national security.”

Foxglove, a tech justice non-profit, welcomed the acknowledgement from the government that their policies do not mean “that every data centre should be approved.”

But its co-executive director Rosa Curling warned that without “urgent action” the public and the plant will “be left to foot the bill for the environmental and social costs of these energy-hungry giants.”

She warned that a single “hyper-scale” data centre requires enough energy to meet the needs of millions of homes, producing “millions of tonnes of climate pollution.”

“We’ve already seen home-building held up because data centres have overburdened the grid in London,” Ms Curling added. “Increased demand for electricity and water also risks driving up costs for households.

“Any action to pause or slow down this construction frenzy is positive, but the reality is that the government and local authorities already have the power to say that data centres can only be built if tech billionaires, not the British public, pay for their costs in full.”

The group demanded as a minimum that “no hyper-scale data centre should be given the go-ahead unless the developer also builds new renewable energy and storage to power it completely — and commits to not draining local water supplies.”

Ms Curling warned that the government has yet to impose a national policy statement on these facilities, with Big Tech firms allowed to “plunder our energy and water supplies” in the meantime.