Data centres are Britain's fastest-growing tracked planning sector in 2025-26, with applications up 32% year-on-year in Q1 2026 on a fixed-panel basis. EV charging is the only other growing category, up 17%. Battery storage is the fastest-declining sector, down 54% year-on-year across four consecutive quarters. Solar PV is broadly flat at -1%. The divergence between sectors is the sharpest in the period LeadLinka Research has tracked, according to fixed-panel analysis of more than 250 UK local planning authorities.
The five main planning sectors tracked by LeadLinka Research split into two distinct groups in Q1 2026, based on a fixed-panel comparison of councils tracked in both Q1 2025 and Q1 2026. Data centres and EV charging are growing. Battery storage, solar PV and substation/grid infrastructure are declining or flat. Between the fastest-growing category (+32%) and the fastest-declining (-54%), the spread is 86 percentage points.
| Sector | Q1 2026 YoY | Rolling 12 months | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data centres | +32% | +4% | Growing |
| EV charging | +17% | +8% | Growing |
| Substation / grid | −6% | −1% | Flat |
| Solar PV | −1% | −8% | Broadly flat |
| Battery storage (BESS) | −54% | −31% | Declining |
Data centres grew the fastest in Q1 2026, up 32% year-on-year on a like-for-like panel, reaching 37 applications in the quarter (compared with 28 in Q1 2025), according to LeadLinka Research. It is worth keeping the absolute scale in view: these are tens of applications per quarter, not hundreds. What makes the growth significant is that it runs against the backdrop of declining or flat applications across most tracked sectors, and it has been consistent across the rolling 12-month period (+4%), which confirms the Q1 spike is not a single-quarter aberration.
The applications are concentrated in the established West London and M4 corridor, with Hillingdon among the most active authorities, according to LeadLinka Research. The growth reflects continuing demand for data centre capacity, particularly around AI compute requirements, in a geography that already hosts the bulk of UK data centre infrastructure. The planning applications represent the forward pipeline: schemes entering the consent process now are likely to reach procurement and construction in 2027 and beyond.
EV charging is the second growing category, up 17% year-on-year in Q1 2026 and 8% over the 12-month period, according to LeadLinka Research. Unlike data centres, EV charging applications run in the hundreds per quarter, so the growth represents a materially larger volume of schemes. EV charging infrastructure typically connects at lower voltage than data centres or battery storage, is less directly exposed to the high-voltage grid connection queue that has constrained BESS development, and is distributed across a wide range of commercial and retail sites rather than concentrated in one geography. The +17% growth is, accordingly, a more straightforward story: the rollout is continuing and the planning pipeline is following.
Battery storage is the sharpest mover in either direction. UK BESS planning applications fell 54% year-on-year in Q1 2026 and 31% over the 12-month period, declining in every quarter since a Q1 2025 peak of 245 applications, through 201, 195 and 121 to 100 in Q1 2026, according to LeadLinka Research. The quarterly chart shows no sign of stabilisation in the data so far. Battery storage recorded the steepest decline of any tracked planning category in Q1 2026.
The fall is a genuine category movement, not a data artefact. The fixed-panel comparison controls for the council coverage expansion that distorted raw year-on-year comparisons during 2025, and the sustained four-quarter trend rules out a single-quarter data issue.
Three publicly documented factors may be contributing: the National Energy System Operator (NESO) connection queue reform, which removed more than 300GW of projects from the queue in late 2025 and specifically identified battery storage as "significantly oversupplied"; a tightening revenue stack, with per-megawatt frequency revenues having fallen from above £110,000 to below £30,000 per year over 2022 to 2024 (Cornwall Insight, Modo Energy); and possible market consolidation toward fewer, larger, better-capitalised projects. LeadLinka Research does not assert a single cause; the planning data establishes the scale of the decline but cannot resolve which factor dominates.
Solar PV was broadly flat year-on-year in Q1 2026, down just 1% on a like-for-like council panel, though down 8% over the rolling 12-month period, according to LeadLinka Research. Solar remains the largest tracked low-carbon planning category in absolute terms, with 7,519 applications submitted in 2025, more than three times the next-largest category (EV charging at 2,136). A -1% Q1 figure on a large base represents a materially stable sector, not a structural shift.
Substation and grid infrastructure applications fell 6% year-on-year in Q1 2026 but only 1% over 12 months, both on a like-for-like panel, according to LeadLinka Research. The 12-month figure indicates overall stability; the Q1 figure may reflect quarterly timing in how major grid projects are filed. Substation applications are individually large in construction value, so the count understates the pipeline relative to other categories.
A 32% growth rate and a 54% decline mean different things depending on the base. The table below gives full-year 2025 submitted-application counts for all five categories, which are the most reliable absolute figures available, according to LeadLinka Research. No full-year 2024 to 2025 comparison is published, because council coverage expanded significantly during 2025 and any raw year-on-year count would be inflated by more authorities being tracked, not by more demand.
| Sector | 2025 applications | Scale context |
|---|---|---|
| Solar PV | 7,519 | Largest category by volume |
| EV charging | 2,136 | Second-largest |
| Substation / grid | 1,964 | High individual project value |
| Battery storage (BESS) | 682 | Declining from this base |
| Data centres | 164 | Small base; growing |
The practical implication is that a 54% decline in BESS applications involves many more schemes disappearing than a 32% rise in data centre applications adds. In Q1 2026, BESS fell by roughly 104 applications year-on-year while data centres added 9. The divergence is real and directionally significant, but the two categories remain at very different scales of activity.
Applications are identified by matching planning application descriptions to sector-specific keyword sets and counted by submission date. All year-on-year figures use a fixed-panel comparison: only councils tracked in both Q1 2025 and Q1 2026 are included, removing the distortion caused by council coverage expanding during 2025. Raw year-on-year counts across all councils give higher apparent growth rates and are not used for the headline figures. The rolling 12-month figures cover the same fixed panel over a 12-month window. Full-year 2025 absolute counts use all tracked authorities in that calendar year; no full-year 2024 vs 2025 growth percentage is published because coverage expanded significantly during 2025. One authority is excluded due to a known duplicate-record data-quality issue. External sources (NESO, Cornwall Insight, Modo Energy) are attributed where cited; figures from those organisations are theirs, not LeadLinka's. Full methodology: leadlinka.co.uk/methodology.
Source: LeadLinka Research, "Britain's Fastest-Growing Planning Sectors 2025-26", leadlinka.co.uk/insights/uk-planning-sectors-fastest-growing-2026, published 25 June 2026. Methodology and definitions: leadlinka.co.uk/methodology.
Source: LeadLinka planning applications database · more than 250 UK local planning authorities · Q1 2025 vs Q1 2026 fixed-panel · ← All Insights