Conflicts of interest for planning consultants

A planning consultant conflict of interest arises whenever your duty to one client is, or could reasonably be seen to be, compromised by a duty to someone else, by your own interest, or by confidential information you already hold. The professional codes treat all three as conflicts. What separates a manageable conflict from a career problem is whether you spotted it, disclosed it in writing, and obtained informed consent before you did any work.

Most of the trouble in practice comes from the third category. Party and own-interest conflicts are visible. Confidential information conflicts creep up on a firm that has been busy in one district for fifteen years.

What counts as a conflict in planning work

Three shapes recur.

A party conflict is acting for two or more parties with competing interests in the same or a related matter: two developers bidding for the same allocated site, an applicant and an objector on the same application, a landowner and a promoter whose option terms conflict.

An own-interest conflict puts the firm's or an individual's interest against the client's. Holding a land interest near the site, taking a success-related fee that rewards a particular recommendation, or sitting on the planning committee of the authority determining the application all qualify. That last one has a statutory dimension as well, because disclosable pecuniary interests under the Localism Act 2011 bind councillors regardless of what a professional code says.

A confidential information conflict arises where the firm holds information from one client that is material to another client's matter and cannot be disclosed. This is the one that catches heritage consultants, ecologists and acousticians who do small pieces of work for many parties in one area.

Disclosure and informed consent

Disclosure that is not specific is not disclosure. A line in the engagement letter saying the firm may act for other clients in the sector tells a client nothing they can act on.

What consent requires is that each affected party is told enough about the nature of the conflict to make a considered decision, in writing, before work starts. If explaining the conflict would itself breach a confidence owed to another client, you cannot obtain informed consent, and you must decline. That is the point most often missed: some conflicts cannot be consented away because the explanation is itself privileged.

Record the consent, the date, and what was disclosed. A file note written six months later is worth very little when a complaint lands.

Acting for an authority and an applicant in the same area

Consultancies routinely do both: a Local Plan evidence base for one council, private applications in the next district, occasional peer review work. The problem is not the combination, it is the overlap.

Drafting a policy and then arguing its meaning on behalf of an applicant in front of an inspector is a hard position to defend, even when the two instructions are years apart. So is preparing an authority's viability evidence and then challenging that same methodology for a developer in the same borough.

Where the work is time-limited and the subject matter distinct, disclose and proceed. Where you would be arguing against your own earlier product, decline. The reputational calculation is simple: the inspector will be told, and the answer you give under cross-examination has to sound as comfortable in public as it did in the office.

A related question is whether the authority can reject a report because of who wrote it, which is a narrower issue about competence and independence rather than conflict. The note on when a council can reject a report because of its author sets out where that line falls.

Information barriers and whether they hold

Information barriers work in large practices with separate teams, separate systems and audited access controls. They do not work in a six-person consultancy where everyone hears everything in the office kitchen.

Before relying on one, ask three questions. Can the two teams operate without any transfer of the confidential material, including through shared drives, timesheets and the accounts system. Is there a compliance person who can police it. And have both clients consented to the arrangement with knowledge of the barrier, rather than being told after the event.

If the honest answer to any of those is no, the barrier is decoration.

Conflicts that arise part way through

The awkward case is the conflict that did not exist at the start. A client sells the site to a party you already act for. An objector group instructs you on an unrelated matter and then turns out to be objecting to your own client's scheme.

Stop work on the affected matter immediately, tell both parties, and take advice before deciding who you can continue to act for. The general rule in the conduct rules is that you cannot simply choose the more profitable client and carry on. Where a confidential information conflict has arisen, you may have to cease acting for both.

Timing decisions matter here. Dropping a client three weeks before an inquiry causes real prejudice, and an inspector or a court will look at when you knew. The disclosure obligation runs from the moment you should reasonably have identified the conflict, not from the moment you accepted it was one.

Declining and handing over cleanly

Declining is a professional act, not a failure. Write to the client setting out that a conflict exists, that you cannot act, and what you are returning. Do not explain the conflict in terms that breach the other client's confidence.

Hand over the drawings, survey data and correspondence the client has paid for, invoice the work done, and offer a factual note on where the matter stands. Fee disputes on handover are where complaints originate.

Specialist reviewers have a version of the same problem at sign-off. Reviewing and signing a report you also drafted is not independent review, and a reviewer who is asked to sign off work by a firm that supplies most of their income should say so on the face of the certificate. The practice of declaring conflicts of interest in planning reports exists precisely so the decision maker can weigh it, and the scope of what a reviewer takes on is set out in the note on peer review and sign-off.

Record keeping that protects the practice

Run a conflicts register, check it at enquiry stage rather than at engagement, and record the land parcels and parties rather than just client names. Site addresses change hands. Company names change more often.

Four things belong on every file: the conflict check carried out and its date, any disclosure made, any consent received in writing, and the decision reached with its reasoning. That is the whole defence if a complaint reaches your institute.

Expert witness work carries an extra duty. Evidence given to an inspector is given as an expert, and that duty overrides the duty to the instructing client. Say so in the statement, declare any interest in the outcome, and do not accept an instruction where a contingent fee is in play.

PlanScope's professional directory is the route for a review by someone outside the drafting team, and any AI-assisted draft should be treated the same way a junior's draft is treated: read, checked and owned by the person whose name goes on it. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.

This is general guidance, not legal advice; check your own institute's current code and take advice on a specific conflict before acting.