When the council's expert disagrees with your consultant

A consultee objection that says the submitted assessment is not accepted tells you nothing useful. Before anyone redrafts anything, get the response in full and work out which of two things is happening. Either the consultee disagrees with how the assessment was done, which is a method dispute and can usually be resolved. Or they accept the method and disagree with the conclusion drawn from it, which is a judgement dispute and cannot be resolved by more analysis.

Treating the second as though it were the first is the most expensive mistake available. Three more rounds of modelling will not change a conservation officer's view that the harm is more than less than substantial.

Get the consultee's response in full

The officer's summary in a report or an email is a paraphrase. Ask for the consultee's own response, dated, in full, with any attachments. Internal consultees such as the tree officer, the conservation officer and the environmental health officer produce written memoranda, and those are disclosable.

Read it for three things. The specific paragraph or figure in your report that is challenged. The standard, guidance or policy the consultee says applies. And whether the objection is final or holding, because a holding objection pending further information is a very different position from an in principle objection.

Holding objections are common from the Environment Agency, the lead local flood authority and the highway authority, and they are usually lifted once the requested information arrives. Do not escalate a holding objection.

Also establish who the consultee is. An external statutory consultee carries weight an internal officer does not, and in some cases a sustained objection from a statutory body changes the procedural position, including the authority's ability to determine the application without reference upwards. Check the consultation provisions in the Development Management Procedure Order 2015 for the body concerned.

Separate method disputes from judgement disputes

Method disputes are about inputs and procedure. The wrong survey season was used. The background sound level was measured on the wrong day of the week. The trip rate came from an inappropriate set of comparator sites. The model used a ground level that does not match the topographic survey. The assessment applied the previous edition of a standard.

Judgement disputes are about weight. Whether a moderate adverse effect is acceptable. Whether the public benefit outweighs the harm. Whether a level of overlooking is materially harmful in this street. Whether a mitigation measure is secure enough to rely on.

Write out the list of disputed points and mark each as method or judgement. The method points go back to the technical author with a deadline. The judgement points go into the planning case, where they belong, and get argued on the planning balance rather than in an appendix.

A third category sometimes appears: competence disputes, where the consultee questions whether the author was qualified to produce the assessment. Those are worth answering head on with the author's membership, experience and the standard they worked to, and the discipline specific positions in who can prepare a transport assessment and choosing a daylight consultant where no licence exists are useful background.

Put the two experts on a call

The single most effective step, and the one most often skipped, is getting the two technical people to speak to each other directly. Not through the agent, not through the case officer, and not in writing.

Ask the case officer to facilitate it. Most will, because an unresolved technical objection makes their report harder to write. Set a 45 minute call with an agenda of the disputed points in the order you listed them.

Three rules make these calls work. Send the disputed points list in advance so nobody is surprised. Have the author on the call rather than a project manager summarising. And agree at the end what has been settled, even if that is only two items out of seven.

What usually emerges is that half the dispute is a misunderstanding. The consultee read a superseded drawing. Your author used an assumption that was explained in an appendix the consultee did not receive. A figure was transposed. These are resolved in minutes once two people who know the subject are talking.

Writing the agreed and not agreed note

After the call, produce a short note in two columns: agreed, and not agreed. Send it to the consultee and the case officer and ask for confirmation that it records the position correctly.

That document does three jobs. It stops the dispute being relitigated from the beginning each time a new officer picks the file up. It shows the authority that the applicant has engaged, which matters if conduct is ever examined on costs at appeal. And it narrows what a committee or an inspector has to decide.

Keep it factual. A note that argues the case is a submission, not a record, and the consultee will not sign it. One or two pages, no adjectives.

Where a review by an independent professional would help the authority accept the work, the directory of reviewers who can check and sign off a draft sits at professional review, and an independently reviewed document sometimes closes a competence argument faster than correspondence does.

Conceding the points that do not matter

Applicants concede too little and too late. Go through the not agreed column and ask, for each item, what changes if we accept the consultee's position. On a surprising number the answer is nothing material: a slightly different sensitivity rating, a mitigation measure you were going to provide anyway, an extra monitoring condition.

Concede those explicitly and in writing. It costs very little and it changes the shape of the remaining dispute, because an officer writing a report can then say that the applicant has accepted most of the consultee's points and that one issue remains.

Hold the line only where the point actually matters to the scheme or to the cost. And say why, with reasons tied to the standard rather than to preference. The viability field offers a good model of this, because the methodology expectations in the RICS professional statement on viability give both sides a common reference for what a defensible input looks like.

Peer review and agreed third parties

Where the dispute is squarely technical and both sides are entrenched, three escalation routes exist.

1. The applicant commissions an independent peer review from a third practitioner, with the brief agreed with the authority in advance.
2. The authority commissions its own review at the applicant's cost, which is common on viability, daylight and acoustics, and is usually secured by an undertaking to pay.
3. Both sides agree a single third party expert whose conclusion they will both accept, which is rare in planning but does happen on narrow quantitative questions.

The first works best where the authority has no in house specialist and its objection rests on a generalist's reading. The second works best where the authority does have a retained consultant, because it removes the argument that the applicant's expert is partisan. Agree the brief and the cost in writing before anyone is instructed.

One caution. A peer review that goes against you is disclosable in practice and awkward in principle, so only commission one where you are confident in the underlying work.

If the dispute survives to appeal

At appeal the technical dispute becomes the main issue, and the procedure follows from it. A narrow quantitative disagreement is often handled on written representations. A dispute requiring cross examination of two experts points towards a hearing or an inquiry.

Three things to do early. Produce a statement of common ground with the authority, because inspectors expect one and its absence reads badly. Make sure your expert's evidence complies with the relevant professional institute's requirements on independence and declarations. And check whether any part of the disputed evidence is now out of date, since survey data, flood mapping and policy all move while an appeal is pending.

Costs are a real risk on both sides. Unreasonable behaviour, including refusing to engage with a reasonable request for information or maintaining an objection without evidence, can lead to an award. The agreed and not agreed note produced months earlier is exactly the kind of document that shows who engaged.

If the dispute is about a missing document rather than a contested one, the list at all 66 report types is a quicker route to closing the gap than another round of correspondence.

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.