Checking a consultant's experience before you rely on a report

Checking consultant experience is a different exercise from checking qualifications. A membership number confirms entitlement and a code of conduct. It says nothing about whether the individual who will actually write your report has done this kind of work, in this authority, in the last two years. For a landlord converting a house to flats or applying for a house in multiple occupation in an Article 4 area, that distinction is the whole thing.

The checks below take about two hours across three or four proposals, and they are almost entirely based on public records you can search yourself.

What a project list actually shows

Every proposal arrives with a list of projects. Read it for what it omits.

A useful list names the authority, the year, the application reference and the outcome. A list of client names and project values tells you the firm is busy. A list of unreferenced project descriptions tells you nothing at all, because you cannot check any of it.

So ask for references. Give me five applications in the last three years, with the authority, the reference number and the decision. Then look them up on the councils' own public registers, which show the agent, the documents submitted, the officer report and the decision notice. That is free, it takes twenty minutes, and it is the single most informative thing you can do.

Two patterns are worth noticing. A consultant whose recent work is all in one authority may be excellent there and unfamiliar elsewhere. And a consultant whose recent work is all pre-application advice, with few determined applications, may be earlier in their career than the proposal suggests.

Experience with your authority and consultee

Authorities differ in ways that are invisible from outside. Validation lists, local design guidance, parking standards, the tolerance of a particular officer for a particular argument, whether the committee routinely departs from recommendations.

Ask two direct questions. How many applications have you submitted to this authority in the last three years, and what were the outcomes. And who is the consultee who will assess this report, and have you dealt with them before.

For technical reports the consultee question matters more than the authority question. A noise consultant who has had reports accepted by the environmental health team you are dealing with is worth more than one with a longer client list elsewhere. The same is true of the lead local flood authority, the tree officer and the county archaeologist.

Where the report is one that needs specific competence, the qualification question reappears. Our notes on choosing an arboriculturist and reading credentials and on checking a bat licence holder before you hire cover the registration checks for two disciplines where an unqualified author makes the report worthless.

Appeal and inquiry experience and when it matters

Appeal experience is worth paying for in some situations and not in others.

It matters where the application is likely to be refused and appealed: a scheme against an Article 4 direction, a conversion the council's policy resists, an HMO in a saturation area, or anything where members are likely to override an officer recommendation. A consultant who has written statements of case and appeared at hearings will write the application differently, because they know what the inspector will eventually be reading.

It matters less on a straightforward prior approval or a compliant conversion. Paying inquiry rates for a scheme that will be determined under delegated powers in eight weeks is money spent on the wrong risk.

Appeal decisions are published and searchable, so a claim to appeal experience is checkable. Ask for two appeal references and read the decisions. You learn two things: whether the appeals were won, and how the inspector described the evidence.

Named author against firm reputation

Insist on knowing who will write the report, and put the name in the appointment.

Large firms win work on reputation and deliver it through whoever is available. That is not dishonest, and on routine work it is fine. On a scheme with a contested technical issue it matters a great deal, because the report will be written by the person actually on it.

Three questions settle this. Who will write it, what is their experience, and who will review it before it comes to me. A firm that answers all three without hesitation is a firm that has thought about quality control. A firm that says the team will handle it is telling you something.

Where a report has been produced with AI assistance, the same question applies with more force: which named professional is taking responsibility for the content. PlanScope's professional directory exists as the route for arranging that review and sign-off, and the point of it is that a named reviewer stands behind the document.

Asking for a redacted sample report

This is the check that separates useful consultants from confident ones, and few clients ask for it.

Request one anonymised report of the same type, for a comparable scheme, with client details and the site address removed. Then read it for four things.

1. Does it answer a validation requirement, in words a validation officer would recognise, or does it read as a general essay.
2. Are the policy references current, with editions stated, and do they resolve.
3. Are conclusions supported by evidence inside the document rather than asserted at the end.
4. Is the site-specific content specific, or could the report be about any site with the address swapped.

The fourth test is the one that fails most often. A report full of generic paragraphs about national policy, with two sentences about the actual site, will not persuade a case officer and it will not survive an appeal.

Checking outcomes rather than volumes

Approval rates are a poor measure and a claim about them is worth nothing, because the mix of work determines the number. A consultant handling only compliant householder applications will show a high rate. One taking on contested conversions will not.

Look instead at three things you can see.

Whether refusals in the project list were on grounds the consultant could have anticipated and addressed. Whether applications were validated first time, which you can often infer from the gap between submission and validation dates on the public register. And whether officer reports describe the submitted documents as adequate, because an officer noting that further information was required tells you about the original submission.

Then ask the consultant directly about a refusal on their list. A consultant who explains what they would do differently is more useful than one who blames the committee.

Warning signs at the proposal stage

Five things to treat as questions rather than conclusions.

A fee substantially below the others, which usually means a narrower scope rather than better value. No named author. No professional indemnity insurance figure, or a figure disproportionate to the risk. A proposal that does not mention the authority's validation requirements. And a promise about the outcome, which no honest consultant makes.

That last point is worth stating plainly. Nobody can guarantee a planning permission, and a proposal that implies otherwise is a reason to look elsewhere.

Where you are deciding what kind of adviser you need in the first place, our comparison of a chartered town planner and a planning agent sets out what each brings. And if you are still working out which reports the scheme needs before commissioning anyone, browse all 66 PlanScope report types and start from the constraints on the site.

This article is general guidance, not legal advice; check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it. For specialist technical reports, qualified professional input may be required. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.