How to check a planning consultant's registration and record

Anyone in the United Kingdom can call themselves a planning consultant. There is no register you must be on, no licence to lose and no qualification you must hold. So checking a planning consultant's qualifications is not a matter of confirming they are registered. It is a matter of working out which voluntary memberships they hold, whether those memberships are current, and what their actual record with your council looks like.

All three checks are free, and together they take about half an hour.

Which titles are protected and which are not

Start by separating the words that mean something in law from the ones that do not.

Architect is a protected title. Under the Architects Act 1997 it is an offence to practise or carry on business under the title of architect unless registered with the Architects Registration Board, and the register is public and searchable. If someone calls themselves an architect, you can verify it in a minute.

Chartered town planner is protected by the Royal Town Planning Institute's charter. A member entitled to use MRTPI or FRTPI has met the Institute's education and experience requirements and is bound by its Code of Professional Conduct. Someone who is not a member cannot lawfully claim to be a chartered town planner.

Chartered surveyor works the same way through the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, with MRICS and FRICS designations and separate regulation of firms.

Planning consultant, planning agent, planning adviser and planning specialist are protected by nothing at all. They describe an activity, not a qualification. Some of the most effective agents in the country are former local authority case officers with no letters after their name, so the absence of a membership is not by itself a warning sign. It just means you have to look at evidence rather than initials.

Checking the registers

Ask for the person's membership number and grade, then check it rather than taking it on trust.

• For architects, search the Architects Registration Board register by name. Confirm the registration is current, not lapsed.
• For chartered town planners, ask for the RTPI membership number and grade. Licentiate is a stage on the way to chartered status, not the same thing, and the distinction is worth understanding before you pay for advice on a heritage or Green Belt case.
• For chartered surveyors, check the RICS register and, where the work is being done by a firm, check whether the firm itself is regulated.
• For a limited company, look it up at Companies House. You are checking that the company exists, that it is not in the middle of a strike-off, and that the person you have been speaking to is connected to it.

Then check the discipline side. The RTPI, RICS and the Architects Registration Board all publish decisions in disciplinary cases. A name appearing there is not automatically disqualifying, but you should know about it before you sign.

Reading their actual planning record

This is the check almost nobody does, and it is the most useful one.

Every planning application form names the agent. Councils publish their planning register online, and most registers let you search by agent name. So you can look up the consultant, read the applications they have submitted in your area, and see what happened.

Look for three things. Whether they have worked in your council's area before, because local validation lists and design guidance vary and familiarity shows. Whether the applications resemble yours in type and scale, since a consultant who handles solar farms is not automatically the right person for a rear extension in a conservation area. And what the officer reports say about the quality of the submission, which is often more revealing than the decision itself.

Appeal decisions are published too. If a consultant tells you they win appeals, the decisions are searchable, and reading two or three of their statements of case tells you more than any testimonial.

Illustrative example: a householder in a conservation area shortlists two agents. The council's register shows the first has submitted eleven applications in that authority in three years, four of them in conservation areas. The second has submitted none locally. Both are competent. Only one has read that council's householder design guide.

Insurance, scope and who actually does the work

Three questions to ask in writing, before instructing.

What level of professional indemnity insurance do you carry, and is it current? The figure matters less than the confirmation. Advice that turns out to be wrong on a permitted development question can cost a great deal more than the fee.

What is included and what is excluded? A written scope should say which documents will be produced, whether drawings are included or supplied by others, whether the fee covers responding to consultee comments, and what happens if the council asks for further information. Extra work is normal. Undefined extra work is not.

Who will do the work? On larger practices the person who quotes is not always the person who writes, and there is nothing wrong with a graduate planner drafting under supervision as long as you know that is the arrangement and someone experienced is signing it off.

Ask also how they charge. Fixed fee for a defined scope, hourly with a cap, or staged payments against milestones are all reasonable. Fees contingent on the outcome are not, because nobody controls the outcome.

Warning signs worth walking away from

A short list, and any one of them is enough.

Anyone who tells you approval is assured. Nobody can promise the result of a planning application, and a consultant who says otherwise is either inexperienced or being dishonest with you.

No written scope, no terms and no insurance details.

Reluctance to give the reference number of a single application they have submitted, when every one of those is a matter of public record anyway.

Pressure to pay in full before submission, or to submit quickly to beat a policy change that is not actually imminent.

A quote that is far below the others with no explanation of what has been left out.

When you may not need a full consultancy at all

Not every householder project needs a consultant, and it is worth being honest about that. A straightforward single storey rear extension in an unconstrained area, with competent drawings, often needs an application form, plans and a short supporting statement.

Where the project is more complicated, the useful split is often to draft the supporting documents yourself and pay a qualified professional to review and sign them off, rather than paying for both drafting and review. That is the model PlanScope is built around: AI-assisted drafts structured to UK planning policy, with a professional directory as the route to request review and sign-off. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.

Where a report type legally requires a licensed or competent professional, such as a protected species survey or a biodiversity net gain assessment, that requirement is not negotiable and a draft is a starting point for the specialist rather than a substitute for one.

This is general guidance rather than legal advice. Check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it.

If you are deciding what to commission, browse the 66 report types to see which documents your project is likely to need before you ask anyone for a quote, or enter your postcode on PlanScope to see what your site is likely to trigger.