Clearing the to be confirmed flags in an AI draft

A PlanScope draft that says [TO BE CONFIRMED] where a floor area should be is doing the right thing. The flag is there because the drafting refuses to invent site facts it has no way of knowing, and a report that guessed a gross internal area, a policy number or a distance to a listed building would be more dangerous than one that admits the gap. Clearing those flags is the work that turns a draft into a submission, and it is the part nobody can do for you.

Why a flag appears instead of a guess

Planning documents fail validation over facts, not prose. A case officer checking a householder application looks at the site address, the dimensions, the existing and proposed floor areas, the constraints and the policy references. Get one of those wrong and the document loses credibility for everything else in it.

An automated draft can write the structure of a Planning Statement, set out the policy tests and explain how a proposal engages them. It cannot measure your site. It cannot read your title plan. It cannot see the tree in next door's garden.

So the flag marks the boundary between what the drafting can reason about and what has to come from you or from a survey. Treat every one of them as a task rather than a piece of formatting to delete.

The categories of fact a draft cannot know

Sort the flags before you start filling them. They fall into four groups, and each has a different source.

• Measurements and quantities: site area, existing and proposed floor areas, ridge and eaves heights, distances to boundaries, parking numbers, unit mix.
• Constraint status: whether the site is in a conservation area, its flood zone, whether any tree is subject to a Tree Preservation Order, the listing grade of anything nearby.
• Policy references: the adopted local plan name and date, the policy numbers engaged, any neighbourhood plan.
• Process facts: the application type, the fee, the ownership certificate, whether a pre-application response exists and what it said.

Sorting them this way stops the common failure, which is filling in the easy measurements and leaving the policy references for later. Later becomes never.

Site measurements and where they come from

Take the measurements from the drawings that will be submitted, not from a tape measure and not from the estate agent's particulars. If the proposed rear extension is 3.8 metres deep on the drawing, that is the figure in the statement.

Gross internal area, gross external area and net internal area are different things, and using the wrong one is a frequent error. State which you are quoting. Where a council's validation list asks for floorspace in a particular measure, follow that.

Site area needs the red line. Measure it from the location plan at the stated scale, and make sure the figure in the document matches the figure on the form. A mismatch between the application form and the supporting statement is picked up by validation staff before a planning officer ever sees it.

Check the existing figures as carefully as the proposed ones. On an extension, the percentage increase in floorspace often matters to a policy test, and an inaccurate existing figure makes the whole calculation wrong.

Constraint data you have to confirm yourself

PlanScope checks a site against flood, heritage and designated site data automatically, and those results are a strong starting point. They are not a substitute for the council's own constraints layer.

Confirm each of these against a primary source before it goes into a submitted document:

1. Flood zone, from the Flood Map for Planning, including the surface water map which sits outside the zones.
2. Conservation area status and boundary, from the council's policies map, because boundaries follow property lines that national datasets generalise.
3. Listed buildings within influencing distance, from the National Heritage List for England, noting grade and list entry number.
4. Tree Preservation Orders, from the council, because these are held locally and are not reliably in national datasets.
5. Article 4 directions, which remove permitted development rights and are the single most common thing applicants miss.

Where the answer is genuinely uncertain, say so in the document and explain what you did to check. An officer reading that a search of the council's register returned no Tree Preservation Order will accept it. An officer reading a confident statement that turns out to be wrong will not accept much else.

Policy references that need the adopted plan

This is where drafts go stale fastest. A policy number that was right when a plan was adopted may have been superseded by a partial review, and national policy has been reorganised more than once in recent years.

Open the adopted local plan, find the policy, read it, and quote the number and the plan name together. Then check whether a neighbourhood plan covers the site, because a made neighbourhood plan forms part of the development plan and carries the same statutory weight under section 38(6) of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004.

The national framework needs the same care. The current edition was published on 17 August 2026 and uses policy codes rather than the paragraph numbers readers may remember from earlier editions. Cite the edition alongside the reference so anyone checking knows which document you had open. The companion note on checking policy citations goes through the mechanics.

A sign-off routine before you submit

Build the check into a fixed routine rather than doing it from memory each time. A short written list works better than a long one.

Search the document for the flag text and confirm the count is zero. Cross-check every number against the drawings and the application form. Confirm each policy reference against the adopted plan. Confirm each constraint against a primary source and note where you looked. Read the document once from the officer's point of view, asking whether anything asserted is unsupported. Then record who checked it and when.

Teams that submit regularly usually formalise this, and the approach in the note on building an internal review checklist transfers directly.

What a reviewer looks at first

A professional asked to review an AI-drafted report does not read it from the beginning. They go to the factual spine: the site description, the quantities, the constraints table and the policy list. If those are right, the narrative usually follows.

Then they look for internal contradictions. A document describing a two storey extension in one section and a single storey one in another is the sort of thing that survives three readings by the person who wrote it and is spotted immediately by someone fresh.

For report types where a licensed or competent professional is legally required, such as an Environmental Impact Assessment, a protected species survey or a biodiversity net gain assessment, the draft is a starting point for that professional rather than a substitute for them. Sending the draft out through the professional directory is the route to a signed review, and the costs of the tiers are set out on the pricing page.

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.

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