What competent person means in planning legislation

Competent person is not one test. It is a family of phrases scattered across planning and building legislation, each with a different author, a different threshold and a different consequence if it is not met. Some versions are statutory and enforceable. Some are conditions of a licence. And some appear in a validation checklist with no legal content at all, which is why a report rejected as coming from someone insufficiently qualified is sometimes rejected on nothing more than an officer's preference.

Knowing which version applies changes what you put in the front of the report. A competent expert statement under the environmental impact assessment regime is a document with a prescribed purpose. A line in a contaminated land report saying the author is suitably qualified and experienced is doing something different.

Competent experts under the EIA Regulations

The clearest statutory version sits in the Town and Country Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment) Regulations 2017. The applicant must ensure that the environmental statement is prepared by competent experts, and the statement must be accompanied by a statement from the developer outlining the relevant expertise or qualifications of those experts.

Two practical points come out of that. The regulations do not define competent expert, so competence is evidenced rather than certified: chartered membership, named project experience in the relevant topic, and who did what on this statement. And the obligation sits on the applicant, not on the consultant, so a developer who takes the lowest quote and asks no questions carries the risk personally.

An Environmental Impact Assessment is one of the report types where professional input is legally required rather than advisable. A drafted structure can help a team organise the chapters, and the substance still has to come from the experts named in that statement.

Competence under the biodiversity regime

Mandatory biodiversity net gain under the Environment Act 2021 expects the statutory metric to be completed by a competent person and the biodiversity gain plan to be approved by the local planning authority. The competence question here is specific: can the author defend habitat classification and condition assessment against the published condition sheets, and did they survey at a time of year when the habitat could be identified?

Local authority ecologists check that directly. A metric based on a walkover in January, or on aerial imagery, tends to come back whatever the author's letters. A Biodiversity Net Gain Assessment prepared without a defensible survey is the most common competence failure in this area.

Protected species work is stricter still, because it is licensed rather than assessed. Survey and mitigation involving European protected species require a licence from Natural England under the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017, and the licence attaches to named individuals. That is not a judgement about competence at all, it is a permission, and an unlicensed ecologist cannot lawfully do the work however experienced.

Suitably qualified and experienced persons in land contamination

Land contamination uses a different formula. Planning practice guidance on land affected by contamination expects investigation and assessment by a competent person, and BS 10175 describes the work as being carried out by suitably qualified and experienced persons. Neither phrase has a register behind it in the way a licence does.

What regulators actually look for is membership of a relevant institution plus evidence of specialist land condition experience, and increasingly inclusion on one of the specialist registers that professional bodies maintain for land condition and ground engineering. Environmental health officers reviewing a contaminated land assessment will look at who signed the interpretation, not who took the samples.

Where the phrase is statutory in building control but not in planning

Building control has a formal competent person scheme regime. Under the Building Regulations 2010 certain types of work can be self-certified by installers registered on a scheme approved by the Secretary of State, and that registration is a matter of fact: you are on the register or you are not.

Construction health and safety went the other way. The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 dropped the word competence in favour of skills, knowledge, experience and, for organisations, organisational capability. The change was deliberate, because competence had come to be treated as a certificate rather than an assessment of the person doing this job on this project.

Fire sits between the two. The fire statement required at Planning Gateway One asks who prepared it and what their fire safety experience is, and the Health and Safety Executive reads that section as part of its consultee response. There is no register to point at, so the answer has to be substantive.

Who decides whether the test is met

Four different people, depending on the regime.

The validating officer decides at registration whether a document meets the local validation list, which is where most rejections happen. The case officer and any in-house specialist decide what weight the evidence carries during determination. A licensing body such as Natural England decides whether a licence is granted, and that decision is binding rather than persuasive. And on appeal, an inspector decides how much weight to give evidence from an author whose competence is challenged.

Only the licensing decision is a true gate. The others are judgements about weight, which is why the right response to a challenge is usually more evidence rather than a new consultant.

Evidence that satisfies a regulator

Put the competence evidence in the report rather than in a covering email. A short author section near the front, giving the name, post-nominals, the institution and grade of membership, the years of relevant practice, the specific role on this report, and any licence or registration number, does more than an appended CV that nobody opens.

Add the things that get checked in practice. The date and conditions of any site work. The equipment used and its calibration status where measurement is involved. The standard the work follows, cited by number and year. Whether the author is covered by professional indemnity insurance for this type of work, which matters to a local authority relying on the report.

Where a draft has been produced with software assistance, say so plainly and name the professional who checked it. PlanScope produces AI-assisted drafts that cite policy and flag missing facts, and the sign-off route runs through a reviewer. The professional directory is where that review is requested. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.

Where the phrase carries no legal force

A condition requiring a scheme to be prepared by a suitably qualified person is enforceable as a condition, and it does not import any statutory standard. If you are the author, ask the officer at the outset what they would accept, and get the answer in writing on the case file. Where an authority refuses to say, a short note in the report explaining why the author meets the description usually settles it.

The same applies to validation checklists that require reports from an appropriately qualified consultant. That wording is a local requirement rather than a statutory one, so it can be challenged where it is applied unreasonably, though as a matter of practice arguing about it costs more than answering it.

Our notes on arboriculturist qualifications for a BS 5837 survey and on who can prepare an overheating assessment work through two of the commoner disputes.

This 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.