UK Expands DeepMind’s PlanAssist Planning AI to 15 Councils

PlanAssist, an AI tool that prepares routine planning cases for council officers, is being rolled out to 12 more councils in England, bringing the total to 15. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said on 30 October that the tool, developed with Google DeepMind, Google Cloud, Faculty and councils, will be tested for 12 months, with the aim of offering it to every council in England by the end of 2027.

The tool targets the most common and least contentious part of a planner’s job: householder applications for extensions, loft conversions and conservatories. The government says these make up nearly 70% of applications each year, and that early testing cut the time spent on key tasks by 58%, which it says is “helping us halve processing times for routine householder applications from eight weeks to four”. Those are the government’s and DeepMind’s own figures; no independent evaluation has been published.

How PlanAssist handles a householder application

According to the Google DeepMind blog post by Owen Larter and David Thacker, the tool is built on Gemini and works in stages. It first checks that the documents and architectural drawings an applicant has submitted are complete. It then checks the proposal against constraints such as heritage designations and tree preservation orders, against local and national planning policy, and against any objections previously raised, for example by neighbours. Finally it drafts a fully cited report that the officer can edit before deciding.

DeepMind says that in the pilot, which began in June, more than 70% of the reports the tool generated were approved by officers with no edits. It describes the 58% figure as the fall in the average time an officer spent on householder assessment tasks, while the post’s standfirst puts it as “up to 58%”.

The 12 new councils are Ashford, Lambeth, Newcastle, Nottingham, Bristol, Cumberland, North Lincolnshire, Rochdale, Redbridge, South Gloucestershire, Stoke-on-Trent and Westminster. DeepMind says they will join in three cohorts, using live applications, and that the mix of metropolitan and rural areas is meant to test the tool across different communities. The work was run through the Incubator for AI, the government’s applied AI team.

AI Minister Kanishka Narayan, who has also set out measures against AI risks, said: “This is what putting AI to work for the public looks like in practice.”

Planning reform beyond the AI planning tool

PlanAssist was one of three measures announced together. From 31 October, a new National Scheme of Delegation means straightforward applications are decided by planning officers rather than waiting for a committee slot. The government also said 420 planners had been recruited through programmes it backs, beating a manifesto pledge of 300.

Housing Secretary Angela Rayner said families and businesses “shouldn’t be left waiting unnecessarily for straightforward planning decisions”. The release also commits the government to requiring key planning documents to be digitised and published as open data by the end of 2027, which it says will help any property technology tool, not just PlanAssist.

The 58% claim still has to survive a wider test

The figures behind this expansion come from the companies and the department that built the tool, measured on three councils. That is a reasonable basis for a larger trial, but not yet proof. The government’s own wording is careful: the 58% applies to “key planning tasks”, and the halving of processing time is something the tool is “helping” with alongside new staff and new delegation rules. Separating PlanAssist’s effect from those other changes will be hard unless the 12-month Beta reports results council by council.

The safeguards are worth noting. Officers remain responsible for every decision, the tool is not mandated, and DeepMind says every assessment will be reviewed and approved by a qualified planning officer. That fits the line UK regulators took when they said existing law already applies to AI agents: the software can do more of the work, but responsibility stays with people.

The two sources also differ on timing. The government “intends” to offer the tool to every council in England by the end of 2027; DeepMind says it will be available “in 2027”, “subject to successful testing”. Google has run a similar test-first approach in schools, where its AI maths tutor matched human tutors on some measures but not on test scores. Speed is the easier gain to show; the quality and consistency of decisions across very different councils is the harder one.

The first evidence will come from the cohorts now joining, and from whether waiting times for a loft conversion in Rochdale or Westminster actually fall to four weeks.

Sources

• GOV.UK (MHCLG): Faster planning decisions as new rules and AI tackle delays (30 Oct 2026)
• Google DeepMind: Speeding up planning decisions with AI (31 Oct 2026)

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