Loft conversions and garage extensions choke up local planning offices nearly as often as warehouses do. The UK government has confirmed it’s using Google Cloud generative AI to clear that backlog, rolling Gemini-powered tools out to councils across England as it chases a target of 1.5 million new homes by 2029.
Extract: An AI Planning Tool for Old Paperwork
Most of that backlog comes down to paperwork. Local authorities sit on stacks of unstructured records, legacy PDFs, scanned site plans, and decades-old policy documents, and sorting through them by hand eats into the hours planning officers could spend on bigger decisions.
Built on Gemini, Hosted for Government Security
The first tool, called Extract, is already live in every council in England after trials across more than 20 local authorities. Engineers at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government built it alongside the government’s in-house AI team, i.AI, using Gemini foundation models.
Extract’s job is unglamorous but useful. It pulls structured data out of old planning PDFs, the scanned forms and historical records that officers used to retype by hand. Government estimates suggest the tool saves each council around 255 hours of manual data entry a year, time that can go toward applications that actually need a person’s judgment.
Because planning files hold sensitive civic records, Google Cloud hosts the underlying Gemini models in an environment built for data sovereignty, with controls in place to block prompt injection attacks and other attempts to manipulate the system.
Augmented Planning Decisions: AI for Complex Cases
A second, more ambitious tool called Augmented Planning Decisions (APD) is still in alpha testing.
Three Councils, One Alpha Test
Three local authorities, the London Boroughs of Barnet and Camden plus Dorset Council, are running APD against live applications right now, each bringing its own mix of local policies for the system to learn from. APD gathers incoming documents, flags missing information, checks proposals against local and national planning policy, summarises public objections, and drafts a first version of the officer’s report. MHCLG wants it live in all 300-plus English local authorities by 2027.
Why Officers Still Make the Final Call
Householder Applications Are the Real Bottleneck
Householder applications, things like loft conversions and home extensions, make up roughly 70 percent of everything councils process each year. Paul Maltby of Faculty, one of the firms building APD alongside Google DeepMind, said the tool is meant to take the drudgery out of reviewing those simple cases so officers can focus on housing estates and warehouses instead.
Every report APD drafts still passes through a human planning officer before anything gets approved or rejected. The software also records its reasoning step by step, giving councils an audit trail for each application it touches.
Conclusion: Faster Paperwork, Same Decision-Makers
None of this changes who has the final say. Planning officers remain in charge, and the goal is to cut the time it takes them to get there. Ministers are targeting a 50 percent reduction in decision timelines once both tools scale nationally.
For a family waiting months on a straightforward extension, or a developer stuck behind a backlog, that’s the part worth watching. We’ll keep tracking how UK government bodies put Google Cloud and Gemini to work as the rollout continues.
