Lancaster City Council selected for national innovation project to modernise planning to support future homes, jobs and infrastructure in the district
Lancaster City Council has been selected as a partner in a nationally funded innovation project that will use AI to improve biodiversity assessments during preparation of the Local Plan and will support future planning and housing delivery across the district.
The council is one of 11 selected for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government's (MHCLG) PropTech Innovation Fund, and will see it work with Newark and Sherwood District Council and BNGAI™ by AiDASH, a nature intelligence platform, on the pilot project called BNGAI: AI-Powered Biodiversity Assessments for Strategic Housing and Economic Land Availability Assessments.
The project will explore how AI and digital technology can help local authorities assess biodiversity more efficiently and consistently to make better-informed decisions about where future development should take place while protecting important habitats and wildlife.
The project team will test innovative tools that use high-resolution satellite imagery for AI-powered habitat mapping, combined with existing biodiversity datasets and other information, that can help planning officers access and use the information quickly and consistently. It will reduce the time spent gathering and processing information.
Councillor Paul Hart, Lancaster City Council’s member with responsibility for biodiversity, said: "We are delighted to be involved in this nationally recognised innovation programme. This project will help us explore how new technology can make planning processes more efficient while maintaining a strong focus on protecting and enhancing our natural environment.
“One of the biggest challenges in planning is gathering and analysing large amounts of information about potential development sites. By reducing the time spent on data collection, it enables officers to assess sites more efficiently and ensure the district can plan for the homes, jobs and infrastructure it needs in the future.
"So, this technology will support our officers rather than replace professional expertise, allowing specialist staff to spend more time applying their knowledge and judgement where it adds the greatest value."
The pilot will provide Lancaster City Council with access to satellite-driven habitat mapping and AI-enabled biodiversity datasets that can be integrated into existing planning systems.
The technology has already demonstrated its ability to significantly reduce the time and cost involved in gathering and processing biodiversity information, and the pilot will test how these benefits can be applied to strategic plan-making and enable officers to focus on detailed assessment and analysis.
While ecological expertise will remain essential, the tools will help streamline routine tasks and provide valuable strategic evidence about habitat distribution across the district.
As the lead local planning authority in the project, the council will play a key role in shaping how the technology is developed and tested, ensuring it meets the practical needs of local authorities and can potentially be adopted more widely across the planning sector in the future.
The project is part of the £2.4 million PropTech Innovation Fund, the MHCLG’s flagship programme for digital projects designed to modernise England's planning system.
Notes to editors
Lancaster City Council is part of one of 11 consortia selected as finalists in Round 6 of the PropTech Innovation Fund.
The Fund is part of MHCLG’s Digital Planning programme, which was set up to support local planning and combined authorities and industry, in developing, testing and adopting digital tools that can modernise planning and accelerate housing delivery.
This Round is supported and coordinated by PUBLIC, a tech-advisory firm that supports digital innovation and provides £2.4 million in grant funding shared among the consortia. Each consortium consists of at least one PropTech company and a minimum of two local planning or combined authorities. This is to ensure that solutions are built and tested across a range of real planning environments.
The selected pilot projects are addressing two major topics: the challenges with evidence-gathering and data-flow across tiers of plan-making, and the need to make Section 106 negotiation quicker and easier. The eight-month pilot phase started this month (July), leading to presentation of completed pilots planned for early in 2027.
Last updated: 23 July 2026