Keir Starmer Used Dodgy Figures to Claim 4,000 New Jobs. In Fact, It’s Only 400

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When Keir Starmer announced the creation of a £10 billion AI datacentre at Blyth in Northumberland last year, it was with a promise that the site would bring 4,000 jobs to the north-east of England.

For an ex-mining town, once home to two coal power stations, this was welcome news. The area had been let down once before: the new “artificial intelligence datacentre” will open on a site once destined to host Britishvolt, the startup planning to employ 3,000 people making batteries for electric vehicles that collapsed spectacularly in 2023.

However, it has since emerged that the true figure for job creation is closer to just 300 to 400 permanent staff, a tenth of what Starmer promised. Other media outlets have noted the yawning gap between Starmer’s hype and the disappointing reality. But the apparent willingness of the government to launder dodgy figures provided by the PR machine of a rapacious private equity firm has not been scrutinised – until now.

When asked in January by Labour MP Chi Onwurah what the evidential basis for the 4,000 claim was in a parliamentary question, Chris Bryant, a minister in the culture and science department, said that it had been supplied by Northumberland County Council.

However, in a freedom of information request seen by Novara Media sent by Foxglove, a legal campaign group monitoring big tech, the council revealed that that source was in fact Blackstone, the vampiric US private equity giant behind the data centre’s construction. The 4,000 figure came from Blackstone’s “evidence of the anticipated job creation numbers” put forward in the planning application.  

Martha Dark, Foxglove’s co-executive director, said that Starmer had either “willingly promoted US Blackstone-owned developer QTS’s PR spiel on jobs, in effect laundering the dubious credibility of the claim through association with his office – or he didn’t know the claim came from them.

“That would put him at risk of looking like an easy target for whatever garbage Amazon Web Services, Microsoft et al feed him about the magical powers of AI for creating growth. We’d encourage the government to set out a real plan for growth that will work for British workers and businesses – not American Big Tech.”

In planning documents supplied by the asset manager, the 4,000 figure is broken down into 1,200 of the jobs will be in temporary construction roles, with a further 2,700 jobs being “indirect” – meaning jobs in the supply chain or jobs created in the local area through the wages of those directly employed. 

Blackstone told the Financial Times that they’d calculated the number of additional jobs by using research conducted by consultancy firm PwC on the impact of data centres in the US that had been commissioned by the Data Center Coalition, data centre membership association – hardly a disinterested party.

Labour has pinned much of its hopes for kick-starting productivity on the expansion of artificial intelligence, promising to “mainline AI into the veins” of the nation. Last year, the government went so far as to designate data centres critical national infrastructure, meaning that their construction will be approved by the Planning Inspectorate and not by local authorities, thereby bypassing any opposition from local residents.

But campaigners say that Labour’s plans for growth are not based on reality, but on inflated claims made by those with financial incentives.

Blackstone is headed up by Donald Trump backer Stephen Schwarzman, and is the world’s largest commercial landlord. The company’s chief operating officer, Jon Gray, met with Starmer last September, where he described the company as “all-in on the UK.”

As demand for AI tools has boomed, tech companies have raced to construct new data centers. However, campaigners are concerned about the impact these huge facilities have on local infrastructure.

Dark said that Starmer “has put building scores of massive new data centres at the core of his plans for growth, but there’s a big problem – once built, they create few actual jobs.

“Eye-watering amounts of our power and drinking water needed to keep them running yes, but human workers? Not so much.”

Last week, it was revealed that the new data centre would emit as much carbon dioxide as Birmingham airport, bringing Labour’s commitment to its net zero goals firmly into question.

Tech industry insiders have also expressed concern about the impact that data centres, which use water for cooling, could lead to water shortages. Campaigners argue that tech companies rely on the idea of job creation as a way to deflect from criticism about their environmental impact.

Starmer’s decision to endorse the “thousands of jobs” figure comes despite the well-documented gap between the claims made by data centre developers, who often present the vast facilities as creating an employment bonanza, and the reality of the fairly scant number of employees required to service the empty server halls. 

In America’s Washington State, tech companies secured vast tax breaks for data centres, on the basis that their construction would spur job creation in distressed rural areas. The breaks – described as one of the state’s largest corporate giveaways – have cost more than $474 million in taxpayer funds since 2018.

But the exact number of jobs the centres have brought to the state is not a matter of public record, and the threshold required for what companies can get away with calling job creation is extremely low. The only publicly released audit showed that tax break recipients could demonstrate job creation by hiring 260 workers across numerous data centres, at a cost to the state of around $53million annually.

The government did not respond to a request for comment.