The £8.2 million collaboration aims to halve decision times for the nearly 250,000 householder planning applications filed annually in England.
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) has launched an AI-powered prototype called Augmented Planning Decisions, or APD, built in collaboration with Google DeepMind, Google Cloud, and UK AI firm Faculty. The tool’s goal is straightforward: cut processing times for householder planning applications by up to 50%.
The contract backing this effort is worth £8.2 million.
Roughly 350,000 planning applications land on council desks every year. Nearly 70% of those are householder applications, the kind covering extensions, loft conversions, and garden walls. That’s about 245,000 applications annually that follow largely predictable patterns, involve standardized documentation, and still take an average of around eight weeks to process.
The APD tool automates the repetitive parts of this workflow. It handles data extraction, performs initial assessments, and organizes documentation so that planning officers can focus on the judgment calls that actually require human expertise. MHCLG has been explicit that human oversight remains non-negotiable. Planning officers retain full authority over every decision.
Alpha trials kicked off in May 2026 across three councils: Barnet, Camden, and Dorset. A national rollout is expected from 2027, assuming the trials go well through late 2026.
APD builds on a predecessor called the Extract tool, which has already been deployed to digitize legacy planning documents across local councils. A process that previously took up to two hours per document manually now completes in about 40 seconds. On average, that saves an individual council 255 hours of manual work per year.
The UK government has set an ambitious housing target of delivering 1.5 million new homes by 2029, and the planning system has been widely identified as one of the key friction points standing in the way. If APD can genuinely halve processing times for 70% of all applications, that frees up significant capacity for councils to handle the larger, more complex developments that actually move the needle on housing supply.
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