Artificial Intelligence - Alpha

For this Alpha phase the Planning Inspectorate requires an agile, flexible partner to deliver a project, to take forward learning from our recent AI innovation discovery, to further explore the opportunities / assumptions from discovery, explore standardisation, maximise reuse, minimise integration risks, and make clear recommendations on future phases.

This will enable us to deepen learning, increase engagement and prove whether there is value in future investment to help make Local Plans examinations quicker, more efficient, and more accurate.

Deepen learning Validate riskier assumptions (e.g. exclusion of image files does not expose us to risk that key information will be lost).

Explore using the text inside the Local Plan as training data and effects of standardisation to enable training from other Local Plans.

Explore standardisation Explore Local Plan and representation data structures across a wider sample of representative LPAs to: inform recommendations around standardisation, increase confidence in understanding of the data, and mitigate the risks of extending prototypes to other LPA datasets.

Explore thorough a mini pilot the effects of standardisation across Local Plans, and opportunities to ensure consistent taxonomies and standards across Planning Inspectorate services (see Discovery Report page 38).

Maximise reuse Further explore prototypes from discovery to increase robustness, accuracy, and extension to other LPA datasets.

Explore how features can be extended to the entire examination library.

Explore future hosting and integration considerations and prerequisites.

Identify potential for consistent topic modelling, text segmentation and labelling across Planning Inspectorate services (e.g. planning appeals, national infrastructure planning applications).

Optional requirement for Beta We also include an option for the successful supplier to undertake the Beta phase of this project assuming a successful Alpha and a continuing business need for the requirement.

This option will be confirmed towards the end of the Alpha Phase with timescales to be agreed with the supplier.