Earlier in 2026 we posted “The Zone Special/Money-for-free ports” on this website. We asked whether the post-Brexit proliferation of Freeports and Special Economic Zones (SEZs) was a scandal in the making akin to the mess the water industry became after privatisation; and if the Labour government fully understands what it is getting into.
Here we look at the subject in more detail thanks to a recent commentary by David Powell, who has spent several years digging into the evolution of zones, their current manifestation and the Govt’s use of opaque language and deliberate obfuscation to avoid scrutiny. David makes reference to the use of secondary legislation and statutory instruments, so at the end of the article we have added an explanation of secondary legislation.
THE DIGITAL ENCLOSURE: HOW DATA CENTRE GROWTH ZONES ARE PRIVATISING BRITAIN
Strip away the branding. Enterprise Zone. Freeport. Investment Zone. AI Growth Zone. Silicon Heartland. The same model keeps reappearing across five decades of British economic policy: a public-private partnership (PPP) that borrows democratic legitimacy from an elected body while handing planning power, land, and crucially public money to a private developer or a small cluster of them. The vehicle changes name every decade. The transfer of control does not.
This matters because PPP sounds procedural, a funding mechanism, a line in a council report. It is not neutral. It is the specific legal instrument through which zoning authority, energy allocation, and increasingly whole town governance functions move out of the reach of voters and into corporate boardrooms, dressed up as regeneration.
What we are living through now is a mutation of that instrument. The original Private Finance Initiative (PFI), introduced under John Major and industrialised by Gordon Brown, was at least legible. Individual hospitals. Individual schools. Individual prisons. The contracts were visible, the assets nameable, the scandal eventually documentable. Philip Hammond killed it in 2018 because even a Conservative Chancellor could no longer ignore what the National Audit Office confirmed: PFI was a racket that had saddled British taxpayers with nearly £200 billion in liabilities for infrastructure worth a fraction of that.
What is being built now is PFI’s mutated successor. Not for a hospital. Not for a school. For entire cities, entire zones, entire data infrastructure ecosystems that will underpin the digital economy for a generation. The contracts are embedded in secondary legislation beyond parliamentary scrutiny (*see note). The zone licences run for 25 years. The planning powers sit with mayoral development corporations rather than elected councils. The public has no meaningful input and, in most cases, no knowledge that any of this is happening.
That is the design. That is the point.
The Fifty-Year Throughline
The architecture has a history that the current commentary never traces.
In the 1980s, Thatcher’s Enterprise Zones established the template: relaxed planning, business rate discounts, designated areas exempted from the normal democratic friction of local government. The explicit purpose was to attract private capital by removing the public interest protections that would otherwise constrain it.
Post-Brexit, Freeports and Investment Zones rebuilt that Enterprise Zone model for a post-EU customs and state aid environment. The EU’s state aid rules, which had stopped member states using selective tax exemptions and financial incentives to distort competition, were gone. The UK’s replacement, the Subsidy Control Act 2022, is court-dependent and largely toothless, requiring affected parties to fund their own litigation to enforce it. The Audit Commission that might have provided real-time scrutiny of what public money was doing inside these zones was abolished in 2015. The accountability infrastructure was removed before the zone infrastructure was built. That sequencing was not accidental.
In January 2025, Keir Starmer’s AI Opportunities Action Plan merged the zone framework with the AI and data centre push, announcing AI Growth Zones with accelerated planning approval, priority grid access, and energy price discounts for data centres in designated regions. Starmer is the policy’s author. The framing should not obscure that.
From July 2026, Andy Burnham inherits the national AI Growth Zone programme as Prime Minister. But he is not a reluctant custodian. As Mayor of Greater Manchester he was already the lead proponent of the North West’s AIGZ bid, with GMCA’s Digital Blueprint built explicitly around it, running alongside Greater Manchester’s separate Investment Zone, advanced manufacturing, £160 million in public funding, 32,000 jobs forecast. Burnham sits on both sides of this mechanism: the mayor who built the Manchester end of it, and now the PM who oversees its national rollout.
The Ideological Scaffolding
What distinguishes this moment from earlier rounds of enterprise zone privatisation is the explicit governing philosophy now sitting underneath it. Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir and the most politically influential venture capitalist of the current era, has long argued that democracy and capitalism are fundamentally incompatible. Curtis Yarvin, whose neo-reactionary writing under the pen name Mencius Moldbug supplies the intellectual architecture for what has become known as the NRx or Dark Enlightenment movement, argues that democratic friction is an engineering defect to be routed around, that cities and nations should be run as corporations, and that the CEO model of governance is superior to electoral accountability. Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto explicitly frames regulation, democratic oversight, and precautionary principle as enemies of progress. Sam Altman’s vision of AI governance places decision-making authority with a small technical elite whose judgments supersede democratic processes.
These are not fringe positions. Thiel has been a major donor to Trump across two election cycles, personally selected JD Vance as Trump’s running mate, and holds significant influence over the policy architecture of the current US administration. Palantir, his data-mining company with deep CIA and defence intelligence roots, is now embedded in NHS data infrastructure, UK defence contracts, and the data architecture of multiple government departments. Andreessen sits on Meta’s board. Altman runs OpenAI, which is embedded in AI Growth Zone planning across multiple jurisdictions.
The zone is the practical implementation of the NRx governing philosophy. Democratic friction, planning consultation, local authority oversight, parliamentary scrutiny of secondary legislation, is removed not because it is inefficient but because it is a check on the accumulation of private power. The development corporation, the PPP board, the mayoral vehicle, are the corporate governance structures that replace democratic ones. Residents become users. Sovereignty becomes corporate-owned. Citizens become revenue sources. The town becomes a product.