Competent experts and the EIA Regulations 2017

The Town and Country Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment) Regulations 2017 require an applicant to ensure that the environmental statement is prepared by competent experts, and to accompany it with a statement outlining the relevant expertise or qualifications of those experts. That is an express duty in the Regulations rather than a matter of good practice, and it changed how environmental statements are assembled in England.

Nothing in the Regulations defines competence. There is no register, no licence and no minimum qualification. What exists is a duty on the applicant to satisfy themselves, and a duty to evidence how they did so.

Where the requirement sits in the Regulations

The relevant provisions sit in the part of the 2017 Regulations dealing with the content of an environmental statement. Two obligations run together. The statement must be prepared by competent experts, and it must be accompanied by a statement of the relevant expertise or qualifications of those experts.

Read alongside the content requirements in Schedule 4, the effect is that every topic chapter needs an author whose competence can be demonstrated for that topic, and the whole document needs someone competent to have assembled it. The second part is where applicants come unstuck.

The local planning authority checks the environmental statement for compliance. Where it considers the statement inadequate, it can require further information, and a statement that does not meet the Regulations can cause the application to be treated as invalid or leave the eventual permission open to legal challenge. The commercial consequence is delay measured in months.

What the statement of competence has to contain

A useful statement of competence does four things. It names the organisation and the individual responsible for each topic chapter. It gives each individual's qualifications, professional membership and grade, and years of relevant experience. It describes comparable projects that person has worked on, at a level of detail that shows the experience is relevant rather than merely long. And it identifies who coordinated the assessment and what their competence is for that role.

Sub-consultants are the most frequent omission. Where the noise chapter was written by a specialist firm and the ecology chapter by another, both need to appear. A statement of competence covering only the lead consultancy does not satisfy the duty in respect of chapters that consultancy did not write.

Coordinator competence against topic specialist competence

These are different skills and the Regulations require both.

Topic competence is the ability to assess a discipline properly: an acoustician for noise, an ecologist for biodiversity, a transport planner for traffic. It is evidenced through the relevant institute, such as the Institute of Acoustics, the Chartered Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management, the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation, the Institute of Air Quality Management or the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists.

Coordinator competence is the ability to run an environmental impact assessment: scoping the right topics, setting consistent assessment methodologies and significance criteria across chapters, identifying and assessing cumulative effects, handling the interaction between topics, and producing a document that reads as one assessment. That is normally evidenced through IEMA membership and EIA-specific experience. IEMA also publishes competency material for practitioners and has operated quality schemes for EIA over the years, so check the current position with IEMA rather than citing a scheme from memory.

The honest observation is that coordination is where most environmental statements are weakest. Ten competent chapters with inconsistent significance criteria and no proper cumulative assessment make an incompetent environmental statement.

How authorities test the claim

Officers and their consultees test competence indirectly, through the quality of the work, and directly, through the statement itself. Common challenges:

1. A chapter written by someone whose stated experience is in a different discipline.
2. A named author with no professional membership in the relevant field, where membership is the norm for that field.
3. A statement of competence naming only the consultancy rather than individuals.
4. Inconsistent significance criteria between chapters, which points at absent coordination.
5. A cumulative effects chapter that lists other schemes without assessing interaction, which is a coordination failure rather than a topic one.
6. A statement prepared largely by one generalist across many topics.

Where an authority instructs its own review consultant, the review will usually go through the statement of competence chapter by chapter alongside the technical content. Assume it will be read.

Evidence to keep on file

Keep more than you publish. The file should hold current curricula vitae for every named author, evidence of professional membership and its grade with renewal dates, the scoping opinion request and the authority's scoping opinion, the appointment documents for each sub-consultant showing scope and the competence relied on, the methodology agreed across chapters and who set it, and the quality assurance records showing who checked each chapter and when.

That file matters if the permission is later challenged, because the question will be whether the applicant took reasonable steps to ensure competence. A contemporaneous record answers that. A reconstructed one does not.

Consequences of an inadequate statement, and assembling a team

An inadequate environmental statement produces one of four outcomes: a request for further information and a longer determination period, a refusal on the ground that environmental effects have not been properly assessed, a permission vulnerable to legal challenge, or an appeal in which the authority's own review consultant gives evidence against your assessment. None of them is a low-cost outcome.

Assembling a team that satisfies the requirement:

• Appoint the coordinator first, before the topic specialists, and give them authority over methodology.
• Agree significance criteria and assessment years across all topics at the outset, in writing.
• Require each specialist to supply their own competence statement at appointment rather than at submission.
• Use the scoping opinion to confirm which topics need chapters, so competence is not spread across topics nobody needed.
• Build in a coordination review before any chapter is finalised, not after.

An Environmental Impact Assessment is the report type where the professional requirement is at its strongest: the Regulations require competent experts, and an AI-assisted draft is a structuring and policy-framing starting point for those experts rather than a substitute for them. The same logic in a narrower form applies to the parallel questions of who can prepare an LVIA and of what a reviewer accepts when signing off an AI-assisted draft. Where independent scrutiny is needed before submission, commissioning a peer review of a specialist planning report costs far less than a refusal, and the professional review route is where a request starts.

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.