Here's how the government is using AI to speed up the planning system

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Here's how the government is using AI to speed up the planning system<br>These two new systems could be genuinely revolutionary

James O'Malley<br>Jun 17, 2026

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POD! On YIMBY Pod this week, Martin and I look at Zack Polanski’s claims about the price of food, and I make myself popular by defending, er, the Big Supermarket. Then we speak to the excellent Thomas Ableman about how the Swiss would have built HS2 completely differently. Listen here, or wherever you get your pods!

Building stuff in Britain is a nightmare.<br>The arguments are well rehearsed by now. Our planning system is wildly bureaucratic with applications sometimes running to thousands of pages, and even the most thoughtful developments can be killed at the behest of a handful of grumpy councillors.<br>The government’s Planning and Infrastructure Act, which received Royal Assent at the end of last year, was definitely a leap in the right direction, and I do not want to play down its significance. It’s an important law, which reformed environmental mitigation, established a legal basis for creating local development corporations, and it shifted many smaller-scale planning applications from committee meetings to council planning officers’ discretion.<br>But fundamentally, these are upgrades to the existing system, and we haven’t moved to something bolder, like a system based on zoning, where buildings are effectively approved by default, as long as they meet a given zone’s criteria.<br>This means that if you want to build something in Britain, even something simple like a loft extension or a garden office, it still requires you to submit a tonne of paperwork to the council, and then to wait for a decision before you can get started.<br>This is very irritating, as it can involve long, uncertain waits. Officially, the statutory target is an eight-week turnaround time for decisions on small/minor household applications, but in practice it can take longer as councils only have a fixed number of planning officers available to scrutinise and approve the roughly 350,000 applications made every year.<br>And the impact of this sluggishness shouldn’t be underestimated. It’s essentially a tax on building, and a self-inflicted hit on the economy. Less gets built, productivity falls, and it ties up money earmarked for investment and financing.<br>However, all of this could be about to change, at least a little bit. Today the government has announced a pair of new projects to help planning officers make decisions faster. One is being built in-house by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) and the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT),1 and the other is an £8.2m collaboration with Google and Faculty AI.<br>And as luck would have it, I’ve got some behind-the-scenes details on how the two systems are going to work.

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Extracting the details

The fundamental bottleneck on planning application processing is the time available to council planning officers. According to MHCLG, the average council planning department has around 40 people,2 which might sound like a lot – but they have a lot to do, and a lot of their work is tedious grunt-work.<br>For example, many existing historic planning documents are not yet digitised, and are still stored on paper in filing cabinets. Which is bad if you’re a planning officer and need to consult the archives. So before you can even begin to consider an application, you need to digitise the existing documents.<br>Annoyingly, this is a process that could conceivably take hours, as the planning officer would have to scan the paper map and associated documents, and spend time manually transcribing information, and carefully drawing out a detailed digital map with a mouse.<br>But this is where the first tool, dubbed ‘Extract’ comes in.

A real planning department’s filing system, though the government didn’t name which one, presumably not wanting to publicly shame.<br>Extract was built in-house by a team at MHCLG. It’s designed to automate the entire digitisation process, and turn paper documents and hand-drawn maps into digital objects that work with modern mapping and planning tools.

Queen’s Club Gardens, the “is Pepsi okay?” of London tennis venues.<br>For example, above is a scan of the plans for Queen’s Club Gardens, in London. In 1981, it received an ‘Article 4’ designation, which limits what can be modified on the buildings3 – a restriction that is relevant if a planning officer has to make a decision on an application in the area. Once it was fed into Extract, it was transformed into a modern digital shape file in just a couple of minutes.<br>And the way it does this is incredibly clever, as to do it reliably, there’s a multi-step pipeline, that involves multiple AI models working to turn a flat drawing into something useful.<br>So first, the PDF scan is run through Google’s Gemini model to extract textual information,...