Conflicts of interest when reviewing a planning report
The test is not whether you feel impartial but whether a reasonable person would doubt it. Here are the six patterns that catch reviewers, and the four-line declaration that fixes most of them.
A conflict of interest for a planning reviewer is any circumstance in which your judgement on someone else's report could reasonably be thought to serve an interest other than the truth of the matter. The test is what a reasonable person would think, not what you know about your own integrity. That is the part people get wrong.
Reviewing and signing off another party's planning report puts your name on a document a local planning authority will rely on. If a conflict later surfaces, the damage runs in three directions: the applicant's permission may be challenged, the authority may stop accepting your work, and your institute may have something to say about it.
Where conflicts typically arise
Six patterns account for most of them.
Acting for the applicant on one part of a scheme while reviewing another part. Previous involvement with the same site, including pre-application advice given to a former owner. Checking a reviewer's own history matters as much as checking a consultant's appeal track record. A financial interest in the outcome, whether through a shareholding, a landholding nearby, or a fee that varies with the result. A referral arrangement where the party who sent you the work takes a share of the fee. Reviewing work produced by a colleague in your own practice. And reviewing your own earlier work, which happens more often than it should on long-running sites.
The last two are the ones most often rationalised away. Reviewing a colleague's report is not independent review, whatever the internal reporting line, and no amount of describing it as a quality check makes it so.
Acting for an applicant and reviewing for another party
The clearest case. If you are instructed by an applicant on a scheme and asked by an objector group, a parish council or a neighbouring authority to review a report on the same scheme, decline.
The harder version is sequential rather than simultaneous. You acted for an applicant on a site two years ago. The scheme was refused, the site changed hands, and the new owner's agent now asks you to review their consultant's heritage statement. Here the questions are whether you hold confidential information from the earlier instruction, whether your earlier advice is inconsistent with the view you would now take, and whether the earlier client would object. If the answer to any of those is yes or probably, the instruction needs the earlier client's informed consent in writing, or it needs declining.
Our note on changing consultant during a live application covers the practical handover side of the same situation.
Previous involvement with the site
Keep a record of sites, not just clients. Conflict checks run on client names miss the case where the same field has been promoted by three different parties over a decade, which is normal in the land market.
Things that count as previous involvement:
- Advice given at pre-application stage, even informally and even unpaid
- A site appraisal or planning note prepared for a landowner or agent
- Acting for an objector on an earlier application on the same site
- Appearing at an appeal on the site for any party
- Sitting on a committee or a panel that considered the site
Dates matter but they do not cure the problem by themselves. Confidential information stays confidential indefinitely.
Financial interests and referral arrangements
A fee contingent on the outcome is incompatible with independent review. If your fee is payable only if the report is approved, or only if permission is granted, you are no longer a reviewer. Say so and restructure the fee, or decline.
Referral and introduction arrangements need declaring even when they are modest and entirely ordinary commercially. The reader of your review is entitled to know that the party who sent you the work has a financial relationship with you. A single line in the declaration covers it.
Landholding is the one people forget. An interest in land close enough to be affected by the scheme, held by you, your firm or an immediate family member, is a conflict whether or not you think it influences you.
What institute codes of conduct require
The professional bodies take broadly the same approach, with different wording. The RTPI's code of professional conduct requires members to act with competence, honesty and integrity, and to declare conflicts. RICS Rules of Conduct require conflicts to be identified and either avoided or managed with informed consent. CIEEM, CIfA, the IOA, CIHT and the engineering institutions all carry equivalent provisions for their members.
Three common threads worth holding on to:
- Identify conflicts before accepting the instruction, not when they become awkward
- Where a conflict can be managed rather than avoided, the parties must give informed consent, and informed means they know the specifics
- Keep a written record of the check, the disclosure and the consent
Where you give evidence at an appeal or an inquiry, a further duty applies: your opinion is given to the inspector, and it has to be your own. The note on statements of common ground and expert conferencing goes further into how witnesses on opposite sides work together without compromising that duty.
Declaring rather than concealing
A declaration in the review document itself is the single most useful habit, and it takes four lines.
State who instructed you and who pays your fee. State whether you or your firm has had any previous involvement with the site or the parties, and if so what. State that the opinions are your own professional opinions. And state any limitation on the scope of your review, including what you did not check.
That last element does more work than it looks. Most disputes about review work are not about bias at all. They are about scope, where the reader assumed the reviewer had checked something the reviewer never looked at.
An illustrative case
An acoustician is asked to review a noise assessment supporting a late-night venue application. She prepared a baseline noise survey on the same site four years earlier for a different operator, under a confidentiality clause. The current applicant does not know that.
The honest route: tell the instructing party that she has prior involvement she cannot describe, that the earlier work is confidential, and that she can only accept the instruction if the earlier client consents to the fact of her involvement being disclosed. If that consent is refused, she declines and says only that she has a conflict. She does not take the work and quietly use what she remembers. This example is illustrative.
Keeping a conflicts register
A register is a spreadsheet, not a system. Four columns do the job: the matter, the parties, the site address with any alternative names it has traded under, and the date. Add a fifth for the outcome of the check.
Search it against site address and against party name before every instruction. On a site with a long planning history, search historical names too, because the same field appears as "land at Mill Lane" in one file and "the Mill Lane allocation" in another.
Where PlanScope's professional directory is used as the route to a reviewer, the same obligations apply to that reviewer as to any other instruction, and the declaration still belongs in the report. 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.
One honest difficulty: the line between legitimate specialism and a conflict is blurred in small technical fields. In a county with four arboriculturists, insisting on a reviewer with no prior sight of the site rules out everyone. The answer is disclosure and consent rather than pretending the problem away, and authorities are generally more tolerant of a declared history than of an undeclared one.
This is general guidance, not legal advice; check your own institute's current code and take advice on any specific conflict before acting.
Frequently asked questions
Can I review a report prepared by a colleague in my own firm?
Not as independent review. Whatever the internal reporting line, a reviewer within the same practice has a shared commercial interest in the outcome and in the firm's reputation. Describing it as internal quality assurance is accurate and useful, but it should not be presented to a local planning authority as independent review of the report.
Does a conflict expire after a number of years?
Not by itself. Time reduces the likelihood that your earlier advice is still material, but confidential information obtained from a former client remains confidential indefinitely. The questions are whether you hold confidential material, whether your earlier view conflicts with the view you would now take, and whether the former client would object.
Is a success fee acceptable for review work?
No. A fee payable only if the report is approved or permission granted gives the reviewer a direct interest in one answer, which is incompatible with independent review. Restructure the engagement to a fixed or time-based fee, or decline the instruction. The same reasoning applies to any fee that varies with the outcome.
What should a declaration in a review contain?
Four things: who instructed you and who pays, any previous involvement with the site or the parties, a statement that the opinions are your own, and the scope of what you reviewed and what you did not. The scope limitation prevents most later disputes, which tend to be about assumed coverage rather than bias.
How do I run a conflict check on a site rather than a client?
Keep a register recording the matter, the parties, the site address and the date, then search it on address as well as on name. Include historical and alternative site names, because the same land often appears under several descriptions across a long planning history and a client-name search will miss it entirely.
Sources and further reading
This article is general guidance about the planning system in England and, where stated, the rest of the UK. It is not legal or professional advice. Check your local planning authority’s validation requirements and take professional advice for your specific site.