Cheap chatbots are helping residents fire off forensic objections in minutes, piling pressure on already-stretched council planners and threatening the government’s flagship housebuilding pledge.
A new generation of artificial intelligence tools is being weaponised by opponents of housing and commercial schemes, producing torrents of detailed, policy-laced objections that are clogging town halls and slowing decisions across England.
The warning comes from Geoff Keal, chief executive of TerraQuest, the company that runs the national planning portal under a joint venture with central government. The portal handles roughly 95 per cent of all planning applications in the UK, giving Keal a near-unique vantage point on what is actually happening on the ground.
“They’re using AI to be able to provide better objection documents, much wider and much broader, which is slowing the system down, because obviously those things need to be dealt with in the right way,” Keal told Business Matters. “It’s certainly what we’re seeing local authorities suffer from.”
His comments will land awkwardly in Whitehall, where ministers have made unsticking the planning system central to their economic growth strategy and the pledge to deliver 1.5 million new homes during the current parliament, a target already under strain from a deepening construction skills shortage and rising build costs.
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