New AI planning tool summarised thousands of public consultation pages in minutes, shared planning service says

Greater Cambridge Shared Planning – the shared planning service for Cambridge City and South Cambridgeshire District councils – said the new software can summarise thousands of pages of public consultation responses in minutes.

The shared service tested PlanAI, which was developed by researchers at the University of Liverpool, on three live planning consultations, guidance documents that the councils were consulting on relating to the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, planning obligations, and Health Impact Assessments.

The software generated detailed summaries of every individual submission and a compendium report for all three consultations in 16 minutes.

"By contrast, planners took over 60 hours to log and summarise the 320 public submissions, including over 18 hours creating summaries – longer would have been required if planners had been tasked with producing an overview analysis of the consultation exercise as Plan AI does," the shared service said in a press release.

The project team said that there were no noticeable differences between the AI summaries when compared to the human-generated ones.

The AI-generated reports included descriptive statistics and analytical insights, offering a clear, data-driven overview of the submissions' content and themes, the shared service added.

According to one of the software's developers, Professor Alexander Lord, the tool reads large volumes of texts, summarises them and identifies patterns across submissions.

Professor Lord said: "While the GCSP planners will still read each submission when responding to them and making decisions, the tool can free up planners' time to focus on the technical aspects of plan making.

"By streamlining the analysis process, Plan AI could allow planning departments to engage the public more frequently and thoroughly on a wider range of issues. This opens the door to more inclusive and democratic planning processes, without compromising the quality or depth of engagement."

Cllr Katie Thornburrow, Cabinet Member for Planning, Building Control and Infrastructure at Cambridge City Council, said: "Ultimately, the new tool could help us make more informed and more efficient decisions, whilst ensuring that the views of local communities continue to play a key role in helping to shape the new Local Plan and other planning documents.

"We know that AI needs to be deployed carefully and responsibly, but this initiative is a step forward in using this important technology in an appropriate way to help create a more efficient planning system that listens to and serves the needs of the community and can take proper account of people's views."

Adam Carey