Procurement opportunity: AI for augmented planning decisions

DSIT are pleased to announce that AI for Augmented Planning Decisions is now officially live

This procurement is a multi-year contract to deploy frontier AI in support of one of the Government's highest priority missions: delivering 1.5 million new homes by 2030. This opportunity represents a chance to:

Transform a critical national challenge – Help unlock faster, fairer planning decisions at scale, directly supporting the UK's housing targets
Build on demonstrated success – Extend our existing work on Extract, which was launched by the Prime Minister at London Tech Week earlier this year and continues to be sponsored by No. 10 via Jade Leung, the Prime Minister's AI Adviser
Demonstrate frontier AI capabilities – Test AI capabilities on high-stakes, high-value public workflows while becoming a visible delivery partner on a programme with national backing

DSIT are aiming to build a planning tool that enables AI-augmented decision-making for planning applications, initially focusing on householder developments (which represent 69% of all planning applications). The objective is to dramatically reduce processing times from 8+ weeks to approximately 4 weeks, with a long-term vision of near-instant decisions for straightforward applications. This goes beyond document processing to encompass the full planning workflow: policy research, material considerations identification, policy compliance assessment, and decision reasoning – all integrated with existing planning systems.

This procurement is a pioneering use of the two-stage competitive flexible procedure and uniquely involves a 2-week "Accelerator" phase with a demo build competition – allowing you to demonstrate capabilities through a working prototype rather than just documentation.

DSIT are actively encouraging frontier labs to form consortiums with UK SMEs and Scale-Ups for this procurement. This collaborative approach is explicitly rewarded in the social value section of the Procurement Specific Questionnaire (PSQ). They believe the strongest solutions will emerge from teams that bring together frontier AI innovation with established UK delivery capacity and a focus on knowledge transfer.

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Heather Cover-Kus

Associate Director, Central Government and Education, techUK

Heather is Associate Director, Central Government and Education at techUK, working to represent the tech supplier community to Central Government.

She started as Head of Central Government at techUK in April 2022 and was promoted to Associate Director in August 2025 supporting both the Central Government and Education programmes.

Prior to joining techUK in April 2022, Heather worked in the Economic Policy and Small States Section at the Commonwealth Secretariat. She led the organisation’s FinTech programme and worked to create an enabling environment for developing countries to take advantage of the socio-economic benefits of FinTech.

Before moving to the UK, Heather worked at the Office of the Prime Minister of The Bahamas and the Central Bank of The Bahamas.

Heather holds a Graduate Diploma in Law from BPP, a Masters in Public Administration (MPA) from LSE, and a BA in Economics and Sociology from Macalester College.

Email:: [email protected]
LinkedIn:: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heather-cover-kus-ba636538

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