England Moves Its Gemini-Built Planning Assistant to 15 Councils on the Strength of a 58% Pilot Time Saving
PlanAssist, an AI tool for English planning officers built with Gemini by Google DeepMind with Google Cloud and Faculty, moves into a 12-month beta on live applications across 15 councils, the UK government and DeepMind said. In pilots in Barnet, Camden and Dorset it cut officer time on householder assessment tasks by 58%, they say, and the government intends to offer it to every council in England by the end of 2027. Officers keep the final decision; the figures are the developers' and government's own.
The interesting number in England's planning rollout is not the 58%. It is the 12 months of beta testing on live applications that comes next, which will show whether a saving measured in three pilot councils survives contact with 15 councils of different sizes. The government is pairing the tool with rule changes and new hires, so any speed-up that follows will be hard to credit to the AI alone.
What the government and DeepMind announced#
PlanAssist brings together planning applications, local policies and site constraints for officers to review, and was developed with Google DeepMind, Google Cloud, Faculty and local authorities, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said. Following a trial in Camden, Barnet and Dorset, the tool will expand to 15 councils for 12 months, and the government intends to make it available to every council in England by the end of 2027, the ministry said. The 12 added councils include Lambeth, Newcastle, Nottingham, Bristol and Westminster, according to the release.
Google DeepMind says PlanAssist validates documents and drawings, checks applications against constraints such as tree preservation orders and against local and national policy, and drafts fully cited reports that officers can edit before deciding. It was built with Gemini, the company says.
The claims, and who is making them#
In pilot testing, PlanAssist cut the average time an officer spent on householder assessment tasks by 58%, DeepMind says. The government says that early testing helped halve processing times for routine householder applications from eight weeks to four. DeepMind also says more than 70% of the reports the tool generated were approved by officers with no edits.
AI Minister Kanishka Narayan, who earlier this month warned that an AI-driven breach of Britain's defences was likely, said the tool was "slashing the time spent on routine planning tasks by more than half."
The government says PlanAssist will not be mandated software, and that every assessment will be reviewed and approved by a qualified officer. From October 31, a new National Scheme of Delegation also lets officers rather than committees decide straightforward applications, and the government says it has recruited 420 planners through backed programmes, the release says.
Limits#
- The 58%, the eight-to-four-week figure and the 70% no-edit rate come from the government and Google DeepMind; we found no independent evaluation of the pilots.
- Neither release gives the cost of PlanAssist or the contract terms with Google, Google Cloud or Faculty.
- Faster decisions from here will coincide with the delegation rules and new planners, so the tool's share of any change will be hard to isolate.