Iver Heath Residents' Association

The Iver Heath Residents' Association (IHRA) is a Buckinghamshire community residents' body covering the village of Iver Heath, in the Ivers civil parish on the southern edge of the South Bucks Green Belt. The association was established in 2014 and operates without paid staff, run by an eight-person voluntary committee. Its stated aims are to "strengthen the community," to serve as "an effective link between the community and public/private sector bodies," and to "lobby against inappropriate development that is a threat to our village life," while remaining "inclusive, accessible, informative, transparent, credible and non-political." Co-chairs are Leigh Tugwood (an architect and RIBA member) and Renita Shwili, with a treasurer, secretary, and four further committee members.

IHRA's continuing programme of work is on planning, environment, and infrastructure issues affecting Iver Heath. It ran a community air-quality monitoring programme between August 2017 and December 2024 and tracks "major planning developments" including data centres, Pinewood Studios expansion, and motorway services. Its public-facing channels are the iverheathra.co.uk website, a Facebook page, and Twitter (@IverHeathResAss) and Instagram presences.

Iver Heath as a hyperscale data-centre cluster

IHRA's recent work has been shaped by Iver and Iver Heath emerging — alongside neighbouring Slough — as a primary South Bucks site for hyperscale data-centre proposals adjacent to the M25. Two schemes anchor the local landscape.

• Iver Heath Data Park (CyrusOne) at Dromenagh Farm, Sevenhills Road. Buckinghamshire Council granted conditional permission for CyrusOne UK6 Limited's 90 MW hyperscale scheme, comprising a 63,267 sqm data centre, a 701 sqm training centre, and 4.3 hectares of publicly accessible landscaped open space, on a 16.5-hectare Iver Heath site at Dromenagh Farm.
• Woodlands Park / Iver Lane (Greystoke Land / CyrusOne). A larger 147 MW three-building Greystoke Land / Altrad proposal on the former Woodlands Park landfill site between the M25 and Iver Lane was dismissed at appeal in October 2023 by the previous Secretary of State on Green Belt grounds. A revised 90 MW scheme was then called in by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government in 2024 and approved by Secretary of State Angela Rayner in 2025 following a December 2024 public inquiry, a decision now itself the subject of judicial review (see below).

These two schemes and the wider South Bucks data-centre pipeline are the local context in which IHRA's data-centre programme sits.

Activities

IHRA's data-centre-related work that is visible in public sources runs along three lines.

• Local planning engagement. IHRA has tracked and engaged the Iver Heath Data Park and Woodlands Park proposals through Buckinghamshire Council's planning processes. Iver Heath Residents was recorded among nearly 100 objectors on the Greystoke / Woodlands Park applications, alongside the Ivers Parish Council, Save Iver's Green Belt, the Colne Valley Regional Park, and CPRE. Co-chair Leigh Tugwood has been publicly representing IHRA on planning issues since at least early 2023, through a talk at a Colne Valley Park planning workshop.
• Public-facing campaigning. IHRA participated in a flashmob in Iver during the February 2026 Dirty Data Centres action days. Tugwood's "We are not Hi-Tech NIMBYs by any means, and we welcome the potential benefits of IT" framing — used in the Ecologist and Global Action Plan coverage — is consistent with the association's stated "non-political" posture and is characteristic of how IHRA presents itself to wider audiences, leaning on planning-process and community-engagement arguments rather than on opposition to AI as such.
• Stating a national-level policy ask. IHRA's primary policy position, as stated by Tugwood during the February 2026 action days, is "a moratorium on all future hyperscale data centre development unless and until there is informed debate, a public enquiry and a meaningful community designed engagement framework that ensures ownership of the process by those most likely to be impacted." That position aligns IHRA with the broader Global Action Plan-led coalition's national framing.

Coalition role: Dirty Data Centres action days

IHRA's most visible step beyond Iver Heath has been as a coalition partner in Global Action Plan's UK-wide "Dirty Data Centres" action days on 27 and 28 February 2026. In that coalition IHRA stands alongside Foxglove, Action to Protect Rural Scotland, Biofuel Watch, Corporate Europe Observatory, Friends of the Earth Wales & Northern Ireland, Global Justice Now, the local Friends of the Earth groups in Havering and Hillingdon, the London Mining Network, Pull the Plug, and the North Ockendon Residents Association. The same coalition underpinned Foxglove and Global Action Plan's judicial review of the Woodlands Park approval — the local planning decision Tugwood publicly described as the "Woodlands Park planning debacle"; IHRA is not a claimant in the litigation but is the local residents-association anchor for the Iver / Iver Heath leg of the coalition.

Place in the movement

The Iver Heath Residents' Association is the second locally-led, residents-organised group in the corpus — alongside the North Ockendon Residents Association — whose primary AI-relevant work is opposition to specific hyperscale data-centre proposals. Together the two illustrate a now-recurring on-ramp pattern in the UK: pre-existing village or borough residents' associations, founded for general community advocacy and planning work, becoming inducted into the wider Big-Tech-vs-climate coalition through a named local data-centre fight, and then carrying a national-level moratorium ask back into their own publics. The lateral relationships — IHRA with the Ivers Parish Council, Save Iver's Green Belt, the Colne Valley Regional Park, and CPRE; the Iver Heath / North Ockendon associations with each other through Global Action Plan's Dirty Data Centres coalition; both with Foxglove's strategic-litigation programme — are how the corpus's grassroots-democratic layer is being knitted together with national environmental-litigation and campaigning infrastructure on AI data centres.