Competent person: who the law accepts for which report

Planning law uses "competent person" and "suitably qualified" as working tests, not as job titles. For a handful of report types the test is statutory and the author's competence is a condition of the document being lawful. For most others it is a policy expectation written into a validation checklist or a consultee's standing advice, which means an authority can refuse to validate an application where the author cannot show the right background. Knowing which of the two you are dealing with changes the liability you carry when you sign a report.

The distinction matters most to reviewers. If you put your name to a protected species method statement you are exposed under the licensing regime, whoever typed the first draft. If you put your name to a parking survey you are exposed only to professional negligence and your reputation with the case officer.

Where the phrase comes from

There is no single definition. Each regime that uses the idea defines it for its own purposes, and the drafting varies.

The Town and Country Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment) Regulations 2017 come closest to an express duty. Regulation 18 requires an Environmental Statement to be prepared by competent experts and requires the applicant to provide a statement of the expertise or qualifications of those experts. That is a procedural requirement with teeth: an Environmental Statement without the competence declaration is incomplete.

The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 and the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017 take a different route. They do not define competence at all. Instead they make certain activities offences unless carried out under a licence, and Natural England grants licences only to named individuals who can evidence relevant experience with the species in question. Competence is enforced through the licence rather than through planning.

The Environment Act 2021 regime for biodiversity net gain sits somewhere between the two. The statutory biodiversity metric and its user guide describe who should complete habitat condition assessments, and the biodiversity gain plan is approved by the local planning authority rather than by a regulator. Authorities routinely ask for the surveyor's qualifications before accepting a baseline.

The report types where it is a legal requirement

Six report types carry a hard competence requirement. Each has a different legal hook, which is why a single blanket policy about author qualifications never works.

The Environmental Impact Assessment case is the clearest. The regulation names the obligation, so a reviewer can point to it. The Protected Species Survey case is the sharpest, because an unlicensed disturbance survey can be a criminal offence rather than a validation problem.

Contamination is the one most often got wrong. The NPPF places responsibility on the developer to establish that a site is suitable for its proposed use, and authorities translate that into a requirement for reports written in accordance with BS 10175 by people with relevant ground investigation experience. A desk study assembled by a planner from online map layers will usually be returned.

Where competence is expected rather than required

A much longer list of report types sits in the "professional recommended" category. Preliminary Ecological Appraisal, Arboricultural Impact Assessment, Air Quality Assessment, Noise Impact Assessment, Transport Assessment, Viability Assessment, BREEAM Pre-Assessment, Basement Impact Assessment and Historic Building Recording all fall here.

For these, the pressure comes from three places rather than from statute. The council's local validation list may specify an author qualification. A statutory consultee may apply standing advice that says who it will accept. And the relevant British Standard or institute guidance may define a methodology that only a member can credibly follow, which is the practical position with a BS 4142 sound assessment or a BS 5837 tree survey.

That third route is the one reviewers lean on. If a method requires calibrated measurement equipment, a particular survey window or a species licence, then whoever lacks those cannot produce the output, whatever their job title says.

How an authority actually tests it

Officers rarely interrogate credentials directly. They look for four things, in roughly this order.

1. A named author with post-nominals and a stated role, rather than a company name alone.
2. A method section that cites the standard the report claims to follow, with the edition.
3. Survey dates that fall inside the recognised window for the receptor being assessed.
4. Equipment, licence numbers or metric version numbers where the standard calls for them.

A report that carries all four will usually pass validation even if the author is unknown to the authority. A report missing the survey dates will attract a question regardless of who wrote it.

An illustrative example

This example is illustrative. A small developer submits a nine dwelling scheme on a paddock with a derelict stable. The ecology chapter is written by a graduate ecologist who holds no bat licence. Her preliminary roost assessment is external only, carried out in November, and records moderate roost potential in the stable roof.

That report is defensible as a Preliminary Ecological Appraisal, because a roost assessment is observational and does not require a licence. What it cannot do is close the question. The moderate potential finding triggers emergence surveys in the May to September window, and those must be run by a licensed ecologist. The authority is entitled to refuse to determine the application until the survey evidence exists, because a decision taken without it would risk breaching the Habitats Regulations.

The cost consequence is a season, not a fee. And that is the usual shape of competence failures: the money is small, the programme damage is large.

What the term is often confused with

Chartered status is not competence. A chartered planner is not thereby competent to write an air quality chapter, and an unchartered acoustician with twenty years of industrial measurement behind them may be the right author for a BS 4142 assessment. The institutes set entry standards for a discipline, not for a document.

Professional indemnity insurance is not competence either, although the two interact. An insurer will decline a claim on work outside the scope declared on the policy, so an author stepping outside their discipline may be uninsured for exactly the report that goes wrong.

Nor is a company accreditation personal competence. Accreditation schemes certify management systems and laboratory procedures. They say nothing about whether the individual who walked the site could identify what was on it.

Checking the position for a site

Work through the constraints before the authorship question. The report types a site triggers determine which competence rules bite, and that order saves repeated scoping.

• Identify designations and receptors first: flood zone, listed buildings and conservation areas, SSSI, Tree Preservation Orders, Air Quality Management Area, building height.
• Match each to its report type and check whether the requirement is statutory or policy based.
• For statutory ones, confirm the licence, metric version or competence declaration exists before survey work starts.
• For policy ones, read the council's own validation list, because the author qualification it names is the standard you will be judged against.

Where a draft comes to you for review rather than for authorship, the scope of your sign off is the thing to pin down in writing. Reviewing a method is not the same undertaking as adopting a dataset you did not collect. The professional directory route exists for exactly that handover, and the declaration at sign off should say which of the two you are doing.

PlanScope drafts any of its 66 report types with the policy structure and citations in place and inserts "TO BE CONFIRMED" flags wherever site specific facts are missing, which keeps the gaps visible rather than filled with plausible text. For the six report types above it is a starting point for the competent or licensed professional, never a substitute for one.

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.