Overview
- Project partners announced that an Augmented Planning Decisions prototype entered alpha tests with Barnet, Dorset and Camden councils on Tuesday to help officers pre-assess cases, extract data and draft reports.
- The government’s Extract tool, developed by the MHCLG Incubator for AI, was rolled out to all councils in England earlier this month and is expected to save each council about 255 hours a year of manual document work.
- The models driving the tools include DeepMind’s Gemini and computer vision components such as Meta’s Segment Anything Model, and Google Cloud hosts the prototype in a protected environment to maintain data sovereignty and reduce injection risks.
- Design rules keep planning officers as the final decision-makers and require the prototype to record its reasoning at each step to create an audit trail for transparency and accountability.
- Officials say the tools aim to halve decision time on straightforward householder applications to free capacity for complex cases and help meet the 1.5 million homes by 2029 goal, with national availability for the prototype planned for 2027 and results still early.