AI drafting and the competent expert rule in EIA
The EIA Regulations 2017 require the environmental statement to be prepared by competent experts and the applicant to evidence their qualifications. That sets a hard boundary around drafting support.
Regulation 18(5) of the Town and Country Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment) Regulations 2017 requires the applicant to ensure that the environmental statement is prepared by competent experts, and to submit with it a statement outlining the relevant expertise or qualifications of those experts. That is the EIA competent expert requirement, and it is a condition of a valid submission rather than a matter of good manners.
It does not say the experts must type every word. It says they must prepare the statement. The distinction is where any sensible drafting workflow lives, and it is narrower than software marketing usually implies.
What the regulations require of the authors
Regulation 18(3) sets out what an environmental statement must contain: a description of the development, a description of the likely significant effects on the environment, a description of the features and measures proposed to avoid, prevent or reduce and, if possible, offset those effects, a description of the reasonable alternatives studied and the main reasons for the choice made, and a non-technical summary. Schedule 4 fills in the detail.
Regulation 18(5) then adds two obligations on the applicant. Ensure the statement is prepared by competent experts. And provide a statement of their expertise or qualifications.
Note what regulation 18(5) does not do. It sets no register, no minimum qualification and no accreditation scheme. Competence is assessed against the subject matter, so the person who is competent to write the traffic chapter is not competent to write the bat chapter, and neither is competent to sign off the whole document on their own.
The corresponding duty on the authority sits in regulation 18(6): it must ensure it has, or has access to, sufficient expertise to examine what you submit. In practice that means your chapters will be read by a consultant retained by the council, and the reviewer's first question is usually who wrote what.
Why an environmental statement is a multi-author document
A typical environmental statement for a residential scheme of a few hundred homes carries chapters on landscape and visual effects, ecology, transport, noise, air quality, ground conditions, water resources and flood risk, heritage, and socio-economics, plus cumulative effects and a summary of mitigation.
No individual is competent across that range and nobody pretends otherwise. What the coordinator does is different: agree the scope, fix a common baseline year and study area, impose a consistent significance methodology, run the cumulative assessment, and make the chapters agree with each other about the development they are assessing.
That coordination role is where most environmental statements go wrong, and it is not a technical competence question at all. Chapters written against different masterplan revisions, different construction programmes or different site areas are the single most common reason a statement gets a regulation 25 request for further information. The limits of drafting for an environmental statement are worth reading alongside this.
Where drafting support is legitimate
Drafting assistance earns its place in the parts of the document that are structural rather than analytical.
- The chapter skeleton: policy context, methodology, baseline, effects during construction, effects during operation, mitigation, residual effects, cumulative effects. Same shape in every chapter, and setting it up by hand every time is waste.
- The policy context section, where the same national and local policies are cited across several chapters and need to be consistent, correctly named and correctly dated.
- Cross-reference checking, so that a mitigation measure described in the noise chapter appears in the mitigation schedule and in the draft conditions.
- Turning an expert's technical text into plain English for the non-technical summary, for the expert to then check and approve.
- The description of development, which is written once from the design information and repeated across chapters.
None of that is the expert's judgement. All of it is work that has to be done and that nobody enjoys doing at eleven at night before a submission deadline.
Where the draft is generated from structured inputs, the flags matter. A drafting tool that inserts a marker where a site-specific fact is missing, rather than filling the gap with something plausible, is doing the one thing you need it to do. Clearing every flag before submission is a defined task with a defined owner.
Technical chapters that cannot be drafted
The analytical core of each chapter cannot be produced by anything other than the competent expert working from their own data.
Dispersion modelling for air quality, with the choice of model, meteorological year, background concentrations and receptor locations. Noise prediction against measured baseline data. Ecological evaluation and impact assessment following the CIEEM guidelines, including the judgement about the conservation value of a receptor. Ground conditions interpretation from intrusive investigation. Landscape and visual effects judged in the field from agreed viewpoints. Heritage significance and the assessment of harm.
Each of those involves a professional judgement that carries personal and corporate liability. The expert is going to have to explain it at an inquiry.
Two further categories that people underestimate. The significance evaluation itself, where a matrix of magnitude against sensitivity gives a starting point and the expert's reasoned override gives the answer. And the residual effects conclusion after mitigation, because that is the sentence a planning authority will condition against.
A drafted report is a starting point for the competent expert, never a substitute for one. PlanScope labels the Environmental Impact Assessment as a report type where a professional is legally required, for exactly this reason, and its Environmental Impact Assessment page sets out what that means in practice.
The non-technical summary and its audience
The non-technical summary is required by regulation 18(3)(e) and it is the only part of the statement most people read. Parish councillors, neighbours, members of the planning committee and journalists all start and usually finish there.
It has to cover the same ground as the full statement without technical language, and it must state plainly the residual effects that remain after mitigation. A summary that reports only benefits invites an objection on the grounds that the statement is inadequate, and that objection sometimes succeeds.
This is the part of the document where drafting support does help, because the skill required is plain writing rather than technical analysis. The discipline is the review loop: each chapter author reads the summary of their own chapter and confirms it does not overstate or understate what they wrote. Record that confirmation. It takes an afternoon and it is the least costly insurance in the whole process.
Keep the alternatives section straight too. Regulation 18(3)(d) asks for the reasonable alternatives studied and the main reasons for the choice, and a summary that omits an alternative the client rejected for cost reasons will be noticed.
Evidence the authority will ask for on competence
The regulation 18(5)(b) statement is a short document and it should be built as you go, not assembled in the final week. What reviewers expect to see:
| Element | What to state |
|---|---|
| Chapter | Each topic chapter and the technical appendices under it |
| Lead author | Named individual, not the firm alone |
| Qualifications | Degree, chartered status, institute membership |
| Relevant experience | Years in the discipline and comparable projects |
| Reviewer | The senior person who checked and approved the chapter |
| Coordinator | Who assembled the statement and reconciled the chapters |
Some authorities also ask whether the consultancy holds a recognised quality registration for EIA work. Answer plainly either way.
When the council does come back with the question, the response is easier if the chapter authorship matrix already exists. Our note on what to do when a council asks who wrote your report covers the wider version of that conversation.
Managing a drafting workflow inside an EIA team
Four rules that keep a mixed workflow defensible.
- Attribute every chapter to a named author from the first draft, in the document properties as well as on the cover, and never let a chapter change hands without changing the attribution.
- Lock the description of development and the construction programme at an agreed revision, circulate it, and treat any change as a formal reissue to all authors.
- Require each expert to sign off their chapter in its final formatted form, after any editing, not in the Word file they sent three weeks earlier.
- Clear every outstanding flag and placeholder before the statement is issued, with a named person responsible for the sweep.
Scope discipline sits behind all four, which is why agreeing a scoping opinion early pays for itself, as our note on agreeing what the environmental statement covers explains.
Where a draft needs a qualified reviewer, PlanScope's professional directory is the route to request a review and sign-off. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval. For specialist technical reports, qualified professional input may be required.
Frequently asked questions
What does regulation 18(5) of the EIA Regulations 2017 require?
It requires the applicant to ensure the environmental statement is prepared by competent experts, and to submit with it a statement outlining the relevant expertise or qualifications of those experts. There is no register or minimum qualification set by the regulations, so competence is judged against the subject matter of each chapter.
Can an environmental statement chapter be drafted automatically?
The structural parts can be prepared with drafting support: chapter skeletons, policy context, cross-reference checking and plain-English summarising. The analytical core cannot. Dispersion modelling, noise prediction, ecological evaluation, ground conditions interpretation and the significance judgements all require the competent expert working from their own data.
Who checks the experts' competence?
The local planning authority. Regulation 18(6) requires it to ensure it has, or has access to, sufficient expertise to examine the statement, which in practice means a retained consultant reviews the chapters. Their early questions usually concern who wrote each chapter, what their qualifications are and who reviewed the work.
How should the statement of expertise be presented?
As a table covering each chapter, the named lead author rather than the firm alone, their qualifications and chartered status, relevant experience, the senior reviewer who approved the chapter, and the coordinator who assembled the statement. Build it as the work proceeds rather than assembling it in the final week.
Why does the non-technical summary matter so much?
It is required by regulation 18(3)(e) and it is the part most readers rely on, including committee members and objectors. It must cover the same ground without technical language and must state plainly the residual effects remaining after mitigation. Each chapter author should confirm the summary of their own chapter before submission.
Sources and further reading
This article is general guidance about the planning system in England and, where stated, the rest of the UK. It is not legal or professional advice. Check your local planning authority’s validation requirements and take professional advice for your specific site.