Northumberland County Council is pioneering the use of AI in the assessment of flood risk, helping among other things to speed up new housing. The country council has been given £725,912 by the Regulators’ Pioneer Fund (2025) to carry out the work over nine months.
It is one of 14 local authorities and other regulatory bodies nationally receiving up to £1mn each for projects that would help create a UK regulatory environment that encourages innovation and growth, said the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and Regulatory Innovation Office (RIO).
Blueprint for local authorities
Northumberland County Council is testing the flood risk assessment AI governance framework, an initiative to explore how AI can support faster and better planning decisions related to flood risk at a national scale. The project has two parts.
“First,” said the RIO, “we will trial an AI-assisted process that helps our officers review flood risk assessments (FRAs) more quickly and consistently. The AI will triage incoming applications, allowing our officers to focus on the most complex issues and ensuring that every document undergoes human expert quality assurance.
“Second, we will explore a new approach to assist developers in creating high-quality, compliant FRAs from the start, improving application quality at the source. To keep pace with the rapid progress in the field, we will develop a reusable framework for how regulators like us can safely and effectively use AI. Over a nine-month pilot, we will co-design and test these new processes on real cases. We will then publish our findings, including a framework for AI governance and human-expert collaboration.
“This project will provide a blueprint for local authorities across the UK to implement responsible AI, resulting in significantly reduced planning timelines, supporting local growth, helping to speed up the delivery of hundreds of thousands of new homes, and enhancing public safety.”
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