Very cool application of AI tools to speed up the absolute nightmare molasses bottleneck that is the British planning review process, by removing hours upon hours of grunt-work from planners’ jobs. Here’s hoping it works!
!ping AI
> 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. […] But this is where the first tool, dubbed ‘Extract’ comes in.
> 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.
> 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 buildings – 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.
> 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.
[…]
> Because what’s smart about the way both Extract and APD have been designed is that they are not just like if you or I were to slap a planning PDF into ChatGPT (or, I guess, Gemini) and say, “So what do you think of this then?”.
> Aside from the fact that Gemini 3 Pro is a sophisticated reasoning model, and thus a cut above the experience most users have of AI models, both systems have been carefully designed to break tasks down into multi-step processes, to ensure greater accuracy, and avoid hallucinations.
[…]
> The good news is that the rollout has already started. Extract is now available to all councils in England, having already been tested in 32 local authorities around the country. APD has already been tested in three areas – Barnet, Camden and Dorset, and the plan is apparently to scale up to ten additional councils later this year, before going nationwide next year – assuming the tests are successful, of course.
lionmoose on
Clankers cut council consideration conumdrums
meraedra on
anything but LOOSENING THE FUCKING PLANNING PROCESS
3 Comments
Very cool application of AI tools to speed up the absolute nightmare molasses bottleneck that is the British planning review process, by removing hours upon hours of grunt-work from planners’ jobs. Here’s hoping it works!
!ping AI
> 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. […] But this is where the first tool, dubbed ‘Extract’ comes in.
> 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.
> 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 buildings – 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.
> 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.
[…]
> Because what’s smart about the way both Extract and APD have been designed is that they are not just like if you or I were to slap a planning PDF into ChatGPT (or, I guess, Gemini) and say, “So what do you think of this then?”.
> Aside from the fact that Gemini 3 Pro is a sophisticated reasoning model, and thus a cut above the experience most users have of AI models, both systems have been carefully designed to break tasks down into multi-step processes, to ensure greater accuracy, and avoid hallucinations.
[…]
> The good news is that the rollout has already started. Extract is now available to all councils in England, having already been tested in 32 local authorities around the country. APD has already been tested in three areas – Barnet, Camden and Dorset, and the plan is apparently to scale up to ten additional councils later this year, before going nationwide next year – assuming the tests are successful, of course.
Clankers cut council consideration conumdrums
anything but LOOSENING THE FUCKING PLANNING PROCESS