Whitehall AI tool could help get UK building faster and smarter

Good morning. Israel carried out multiple strikes on Iran overnight, sending oil prices spiking and adding to the already long list of geopolitical crises and uncertainty facing Britain and the world. But it’s too soon to say what the precise consequences for British politics will be. Much more on that in the coming weeks, I’m sure.

For now, some thoughts on the government’s attempts to harness AI to improve the workings of the state.

Saving time

One of the biggest things that this government could do, to make all our lives better and to make their lives easier too, is improve public sector productivity: if the British state becomes as productive as it was even in 2019, then the money that Labour plans to spend on the public services would go significantly further.

A possible means of improvement is through the adoption of artificial intelligence — something that has excited both the current administration and previous one under Rishi Sunak. This week, Keir Starmer unveiled a new AI tool, Extract, developed by the government’s Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (iAI).

Delays to planning approvals across England* partly stem from the large amount of information stored across different formats such as maps and PDFs. Questions about whether a planning application relates to a conservation area, what the boundaries of a site are, what other policies it touches, can take planning officers hours to retrieve. This also creates a further barrier to publishing all this information online and in public, which in turn increases the amount of work that local authorities have to do.

This week, Keir Starmer unveiled a new AI tool, Extract, developed by the government’s Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (iAI).

The purpose of Extract is to greatly speed up that process — something that the AI-powered tool does exceptionally well in testing. The UK’s AI incubator was designed to enable the British state to acquire its own sovereign capacity and knowhow in using AI in public policy. This in and of itself saves time and money. Rather than being confined to making an internal business case, then going out to the private sector and hoping that Palantir or Google or OpenAI have developed something appropriate and useful, it allows government departments — in this case the housing department MHCLG — to bring their problems to iAI and work on internal solutions.

The other benefit is that it can create win-win scenarios. One way to speed up planning is to simplify rules and processes — but these processes exist for a reason. To take my bête noire, the 2022 Building Safety Act. I don’t think this legislation is working as intended and it needs substantial amendment. But it exists because of a real problem, and simply saying “well, scrap it” is mostly not a good idea either. In addition, Extract can flag common, unwanted blockages.

It’s a mistake to only see productivity improvements as a question of “how quickly can you get to yes” — productivity improvements can also involve saying “no” faster. Take the planned Orb in east London that was scrapped last year. The US developers of the 90-metre-high spherical music and entertainment venue said it spent millions of pounds acquiring the Stratford site and “collaboratively engaging in a five-year planning process with numerous governmental bodies”.

There is no planning system, anywhere in the democratic world, that is going to allow you to plunge a residential area into constant, artificial daylight. But it ought not to take five years for that to become clear. An awful lot of people’s time could be better spent if our planning system was able to say “no” and “yes” faster.

*This is true across the UK, but because iAI’s work with the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government has been confined to reserved matters, today’s newsletter will refer to England only.

Now try this

I’ve just started reading I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer, a collection of letters to the Athenian Mercury, an 18th century periodical with a claim to be the world’s first advice column. It’s a fun and fascinating insight into a world both completely alien from our own, yet feels familiar. However you spend it, have a wonderful weekend!

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