Unlocking UK house-building with AI-accelerated planning

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The UK government faces a mandate to build 1.5 million homes by 2029, but planning approvals are bottlenecked by manual paperwork. Local planning authorities spend hours cross-referencing policy documents, PDFs, and historical files for each application — and householder applications (loft conversions, extensions) represent nearly 70% of all submissions annually. To address this, Google DeepMind is co-developing an AI-powered planning prototype with the UK government's Incubator for AI (i.AI), Google Cloud, Faculty, and local planning authorities in Barnet, Camden, and Dorset. The tool uses Gemini to automate the most time-consuming tasks: pre-processing backlogs, consolidating site data, identifying relevant planning policies with precise citations, summarizing public consultation objections, and drafting a first version of the officer's final assessment report. The target is a 50% reduction in decision times for routine cases, freeing planning officers to focus on complex applications. This builds on an earlier Gemini tool called Extract, which converted legacy planning documents into structured digital data. If early trials succeed, the tool will be made available to all UK councils nationally from 2027, as part of DeepMind's National Partnerships for AI initiative focused on reimagining public services.