Google Cloud Summit: UK to deploy AI-powered planning system

The UK’s Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) has worked with Google Cloud, Google DeepMind and Faculty – a company recently acquired by Accenture – to improve the planning system.
 
The collaboration on the Augmented Planning Decisions (APD) tool, which uses Google Cloud, is being developed and alpha-tested with local planning authorities in the London Borough of Barnet, Dorset Council and the London Borough of Camden, to help planning officers navigate complex local policies.

Speaking about how the Augmented Planning Decisions tool is being used, Naisha Polaine, executive director for growth at Barnet Council, said: “The tool’s ability to collect relevant information, undertake a provisional assessment, and draft the foundations of a report has the potential to save significant officer time spent working on the administration of planning applications and direct this to speeding up the decision-making process for residents. In turn, this will contribute significantly to delivering our housebuilding growth targets in the borough.”

The government plans to make the Augmented Planning Decisions tool available to councils nationally from 2027.

Lila Ibrahim, chief artificial intelligence (AI) readiness officer at Google DeepMind, said: “The UK has an opportunity to build the homes our communities need, but local councils face a mountain of paperwork. That’s why we’re co-creating a sophisticated planning tool directly with councils to solve real-world bottlenecks. This will help significantly cut decision times, freeing up planners to focus on the future to get Britain building faster.”

Alongside the APD, the MHCLG and the Incubator for AI (i.AI) – the UK government’s in-house applied AI team – plan to deploy the internally developed Extract AI tool to all councils across England following a series of successful trials. The AI-powered tool transforms complex geospatial information from static documents into digital, structured formats, which MHCLG says is significantly faster and runs more consistently and at lower cost than traditional manual methods. 

The UK has an opportunity to build the homes our communities need, but local councils face a mountain of paperwork. That’s why we’re co-creating a sophisticated planning tool directly with councils to solve real-world bottlenecks

The development of Extract AI, which began with i.AI brainstorming sessions in November 2024, has involved converting paper maps, PDFs and scanned documents into data that can be pushed into the government’s new Planning Data platform. Once the data is in the right format, planning data is then made available to modern planning tools like the open source PlanX system, which is being used by several local authorities.

It uses advanced language models, including Google DeepMind’s Gemini, to read and extract text information. Computer vision technology, including Meta’s Segment Anything Model, is also being used to analyse images and maps. The tool works through a two-stage process. It first extracts key details like dates, locations and planning decisions from text. Then it uses what i.AI says is “intelligent image analysis” to trace property boundaries and create accurate digital maps.

Extract AI is expected to save the average council around 255 hours of manual work in digesting documents into digital form.

Google said Gemini on Google Cloud is enabling the UK government to use the advanced reasoning of the company’s most capable AI models within a protected environment. “This approach allows the government to mitigate risks like prompt injection and ensure that data remains sovereign and secure,” Maureen Costello, vice-president for the UK, Ireland and Sub-Saharan Africa at Google Cloud, wrote in a blog post.