Exploring how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can reduce the time taken to summarise and report on consultation feedback 

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Challenge 

West Oxfordshire and Cotswold District Councils piloted moving Local Plan consultations to new digital platforms as part of Round 1 and 2 PropTech Innovation funding. Multiple benefits were delivered including higher levels of participation and enhanced ease of use for both citizens and officers. However, this growth in citizen engagement led to new challenges with managing and summarising the increase in responses.

Approach 

Both Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) were in the process of updating their Local Plans and used £280,000 PropTech Innovation funding to explore whether Artificial Intelligence (AI) could tackle some of the lengthy back-office processes involved with summarising the increased volume of citizen feedback.

West Oxfordshire and Cotswold District Councils ran a pilot with their supplier Konveio, a document engagement platform, whereby the   team identified and selected three core tools to be developed or improved by integrating Open AI’s GPT model as part of the project:

• A comment auto-tagging feature was developed. Comments can be auto-tagged based on a specific list of keywords per document. Keywords can be added by the client or suggested by the system
• A summary tool that generates a list of short bullet points for longer comments was created
• A user interface was created to produce summaries of groups of comments based on shared tags or chapters within the document.

West Oxfordshire and Cotswold District Council maximised their funding by taking the opportunity to work with Go Vocal (previously CitizenLab), a digital community engagement platform used at both councils. Together, they developed the systems-integrated AI analysis tools which have various advantages including the ability to group input by auto-tagging keywords and generate concise summaries of qualitative feedback, distilling key findings quickly.

Results 

The pilot showed a dramatic reduction of up to 85% in planning officer time, resources and costs required per consultation to summarise and report on feedback received.

In terms of reporting, the test-case consultation conducted in West Oxfordshire in August – October 2023 was compared to the Cotswolds consultation in February 2022 as the baseline. It was shown that the AI interventions could offer an average saving in officer time of up to 85%. That’s a significant reduction in time spent summarising and reporting on thousands of words in qualitative responses received in a consultation.

The pilot delivered considerable savings, though it’s understood that these would fluctuate with factors such as the nature of individual consultations and the volume and type of responses received.

Next steps 

The pilot has been very successful but the need to reduce the amount of time it takes to manually process consultation responses received by email and letter persists so solutions are being considered. Beyond the pilot, a combination of Konveio and Go Vocal have been implemented at West Oxfordshire and Cotswold District Councils and have been very well received. The systems have been made available to all departments and teams across the councils and are being well used to date. Konveio and Go Vocal have integrated the tools developed through the project into their core product offering, so the tools are scalable and available.