Checking an agent's accreditation before appointment

Anyone in England can call themselves a planning consultant. There is no register, no licensing requirement and no statutory protection for the title, which is why due diligence before appointment matters more here than in professions where the law does the filtering for you. Fifteen minutes of checking will tell you whether the person quoting holds a professional qualification, carries indemnity insurance, and has a complaints route you could actually use.

Compare that with architect, which is protected under the Architects Act 1997 and requires registration, or with the statutory roles where competence is prescribed. In planning, verification is the client's job.

Why the title planning consultant is unprotected

Planning is not a reserved activity. There is no equivalent of the Architects Registration Board, and no offence is committed by an unqualified person advising on a planning application or submitting one on your behalf.

None of that means an unqualified adviser is incompetent. Former local authority case officers with twenty years of development management experience are often excellent and may hold no chartered qualification. Architectural technologists handle householder submissions competently every day. The point is narrower: the title tells you nothing, so you have to look at what sits behind it.

Three things sit behind it in practice. A professional qualification with an assessed competence route. Professional indemnity insurance at a level proportionate to the advice. And a complaints and disciplinary mechanism that exists independently of the firm.

Registers you can search

Four registers cover most of the people who might act on a planning matter.

The Royal Town Planning Institute maintains a list of chartered town planners, so chartered membership can be confirmed directly. Chartered surveyors and regulated firms appear on the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors register. Architects are on the Architects Registration Board register, which is the one register where the title itself is legally restricted. And for the technical disciplines that may be involved in a specialist report, each institute maintains its own list: ecologists, acousticians, arboriculturists, archaeologists, transport planners and structural engineers all have professional bodies with searchable membership.

Search on the individual's name rather than the practice name. A firm may describe itself as chartered on the basis of one member while the person handling your file is unqualified, and that is a legitimate arrangement provided the supervision is real. Ask who is supervising and how.

For reviewers who sign off technical drafts, competence is the question rather than general planning qualification, and the professional directory is the route to someone with the relevant standing. Never rely on a membership claim that is only on a website.

What accreditation does and does not guarantee

Chartered status means an assessed level of professional competence, a binding code of conduct, continuing professional development, and usually a requirement to hold indemnity insurance. That is a meaningful floor.

What it does not give you is local knowledge of the authority determining your application, experience of your particular development type, or any guarantee of outcome. A chartered planner whose practice is strategic plan-making may be less useful on a prior approval application than an unqualified agent who submits twenty of them a year in the same borough.

It also does not guarantee capacity. The most common complaint about planning agents is silence rather than bad advice. Unanswered emails during the consultation period, a missed officer deadline, an amendment submitted late. Ask directly how many live cases the individual is carrying and what the response time commitment is.

Conflicts of interest are worth asking about explicitly, particularly in a small market where the same practice may act for a neighbour, a competing applicant or the landowner on the other side of a boundary. The duties involved are the same ones that apply to technical report authors, as our note on conflicts of interest for a report author sets out.

Complaints routes if things go wrong

Establish this before you appoint, because afterwards you are negotiating from a weak position.

Where the individual is a member of a professional institute, the institute's code of conduct applies and it will have a complaints procedure covering professional misconduct. That route addresses conduct rather than compensation. For financial loss you are looking at the firm's own complaints procedure, then a claim against the professional indemnity insurance, then the courts.

Ask for three specifics in writing: the name of the institute and the individual's membership number, the level of professional indemnity cover and whether it is held on a claims-made basis, and the firm's written complaints procedure. A practice that cannot produce all three in an email is telling you something.

Where the person is unqualified and uninsured, you have contractual remedies and nothing else. That may be acceptable for a simple submission at a modest fee. It is not acceptable for advice you will spend money relying on.

References and recent decisions

This is the check that actually predicts performance, and almost nobody does it.

Ask for the references of two recent applications in the same local planning authority, for a comparable development type, decided within the last eighteen months. Then look them up yourself on the authority's public register. You can read the submitted planning statement, the officer report and the decision notice, all free.

What you learn is concrete. Whether the documents were competently written. Whether the officer report records the agent engaging with the policy issues or simply restating the proposal. Whether conditions were negotiated. And whether the case ran to time or drifted.

A refusal in the sample is not disqualifying. Read the reasons. An agent who took a difficult site and lost on a point of policy judgement is in a different position from one who lost because the submission was incomplete.

Where the work will involve technical evidence that may end up at an inquiry, the duties and scope of an expert are different again, and expert evidence at a planning inquiry describes what that requires.

Conflicts of interest to ask about

Ask four questions and keep the answers.

Does the practice, or anyone in it, act or has it recently acted for an adjoining owner, an objector or a competing applicant in relation to this site or a nearby one. Does it have any financial interest in the site, the development or the outcome. Does it receive commission or referral fees from any consultant, contractor or supplier it recommends. And does it act for the local planning authority in any capacity, including on plan-making or as a consultant on other applications.

None of those is automatically fatal. A practice that does occasional work for the authority may be perfectly able to act for you, and will often say so and explain the internal arrangements. What matters is disclosure before appointment rather than discovery afterwards.

What to put in the appointment letter

Get it in writing, even for a small fee. A two-page letter is enough.

1. The scope, listed as tasks, with the application type named.
2. The exclusions, listed explicitly: drawings, measured surveys, specialist reports, building control, discharge of conditions, appeals.
3. The fee, whether fixed or hourly, with a cap and a reporting trigger if hourly.
4. The named individual doing the work and who supervises them.
5. The number of rounds of amendment included and what happens on a refusal.
6. The response time commitment and who covers absence.
7. Confirmation of professional indemnity insurance and its level.
8. The conflicts disclosure.
9. Ownership of the documents and whether you may reuse them on a resubmission.

That last point is worth a line of its own. Where the relationship ends badly, you want the right to use the drawings and statements you paid for in a fresh application, and the position should be stated rather than assumed.

Illustrative example: a landlord appointing an agent for a prior approval application asked for two recent decisions in the same borough, read both officer reports, and found that the agent had successfully argued a natural light point on a similar building. That single check was worth more than the fee comparison. The example is illustrative.

Browse the 66 report types by category to see which documents your scheme needs before you discuss scope, and enter your postcode on PlanScope to see what the site itself triggers.

This is general guidance, not legal advice. Check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it.

PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.