evidoria

← Back to browse

Good practice Imported

Consult — UK Government's AI Tool for Analysing Public Consultation Responses

United Kingdom · London · See the United Kingdom profile · See the London profile

Evidence: Quasi-experimental Top 6% 87/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Consult, built by the UK's i.AI unit with the Alan Turing Institute, uses generative AI to analyse tens of thousands of public consultation responses in hours. An evaluation found its tagging matched trained human reviewers (F1 0.79-0.82 vs 0.74 human-human agreement).

50,000+
Consultation responses analysed (Independent Water Commission call for views) (2025)
~2 hours
Analysis time (2025)
0.79-0.82
F1 score vs expert human coders
0.74
F1 score between two independent human reviewers (baseline)
~400x cheaper
Estimated cost reduction vs manual analysis
up to 75,000 official working days/year
Potential annual working-day savings if adopted government-wide
Consult — UK Government's AI Tool for Analysing Public Consultation Responses

Details

Maturity
Pilot
Promoter
Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (i.AI), Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), with the Alan Turing Institute
Period
2024–present
Keywords
digital government, public consultation, natural language processing, regulatory policy

Context

The UK's Incubator for Artificial Intelligence (i.AI, DSIT), with the Department for Transport and the Alan Turing Institute, built 'Consult', a generative-AI tool that reads and thematically tags free-text public-consultation responses for policymakers.

Results

On the 2025 Independent Water Commission call for views, Consult analysed 50,000+ responses in about two hours; a published evaluation against expert human coders reported F1 scores of 0.79-0.82, higher than the 0.74 F1 measured between two independent human reviewers, and estimated roughly 400x cost savings versus manual analysis. Consult has been trialled on 26 live consultations, with three departments (Defra, DWP, Scottish Government) publishing their own evaluations, ahead of a wider rollout planned for summer 2026.

Implementation

Implementation detail (cost, timeline, staffing, conditions for success) is not yet available for this practice.

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes

Indicative funding routes for practices of this type — always check each programme's current calls and eligibility rules.

Do you run this practice? Claim it — verified implementers get a public contact pathway and can propose corrections.

Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

Attachments

Similar practices you may find useful