Reading a consultant CV for real competence

A consultant CV tells you three things, and competence for your specific job is not usually one of them. It tells you what someone studied, which institute they belong to and where they have worked. The question you actually need answered is whether this individual has written the document you are commissioning, for a site like yours, and defended it.

Read the CV for evidence of that, and ask for the rest in writing. The five minutes this takes is the least costly risk control on the project.

What a qualification certifies and what it does not

A degree certifies education at a point in time. Chartered status certifies that the holder met the institute's competence framework at assessment and has kept up continuing professional development since.

Neither certifies subject-specific competence for the report you need. A chartered planner may have spent a decade on plan-making and never written a heritage statement. A chartered surveyor may be a building surveyor rather than a valuer, which matters a great deal if you are commissioning viability evidence.

Some roles do carry a statutory or quasi-statutory competence requirement, and those are different in kind. A protected species mitigation licence is held by a named person. The statutory biodiversity metric expects a competent person. Land contamination reporting expects a suitably qualified and experienced person under the relevant British Standard. Where the requirement is specific, the meaning of competent person in planning legislation should be settled before you appoint.

Relevant experience against general experience

Most CVs list projects by scale and client rather than by output. Scale tells you very little.

Ask for three examples where this person was the author of the same report type, on a site with the same constraint, in the last three years. A bat surveyor who has worked on ten major schemes and never surveyed a stone-built agricultural barn is not the right person for a barn conversion.

Recency matters in fast-moving areas. Biodiversity net gain, fire statements at Planning Gateway One and overheating assessment under the current Part O have all changed the required competence within the last few years, and experience from before those changes is not the same thing.

Look for evidence that the person has worked with your local planning authority or one like it. Validation lists and local policy expectations vary, and someone who knows the authority's drainage team will get further in one email than a stranger will in three.

Named authorship on previous reports

This is the single most useful check and the one clients almost never make.

Ask for two previous reports of the same type with the client details redacted. Then look at the front matter. Who is named as author, who is named as checker, who is named as approver, and is the person you are about to appoint in any of those boxes.

Large consultancies routinely put a senior name on the cover and a graduate on the keyboard. That can be entirely proper where the review is real. It is not proper where the senior has never visited the site and the graduate has never written the section. The front matter, the site visit date and the signature page usually tell you which situation you are in.

Check the survey date and the report date while you are there. A long gap between the two is not fatal, and an unexplained gap of eighteen months is a question worth asking, as is the wider issue of whether a survey is still valid.

Appeal and hearing experience

A report that will be tested at appeal needs an author who has been tested at appeal.

Ask directly. Which appeals, in what procedure, written representations, hearing or inquiry, and did the author give evidence or simply write the statement. Appeal decisions are published, so a claim of appeal experience is checkable in a way that most CV claims are not.

The distinction between writing and appearing matters. Producing a proof of evidence and being cross-examined on it are different skills, and a consultant who has done the second will write the first more carefully, because they know which sentences they will be asked about.

For a scheme where refusal is a realistic outcome, this should carry more weight than any qualification on the page.

Institute grades and what they actually mean

Grades are not interchangeable between institutes, which is why a list of post-nominals can mislead.

Most institutes run a graded structure. An entry or practitioner grade for those early in a career, an associate or intermediate grade, a full chartered or corporate grade assessed against a competence framework, and a fellowship recognising contribution rather than technical seniority.

Two further points. A fellowship is not a higher technical grade than chartered membership, whatever it looks like on a letterhead. And student or affiliate membership is not a professional qualification at all, although it appears on CVs formatted to suggest otherwise.

Some institutes also run registered consultant or registered practice schemes with additional entry requirements, and those registers are a stronger signal than membership alone because entry is periodically reassessed.

Following up references usefully

A reference that asks whether the consultant was good will produce the answer that they were.

Ask three questions instead. Did the report get through validation without a request for further information. Did the officer or the statutory consultee raise any methodological objection. And would you use the same individual again for the same type of work.

Speak to the person who managed the commission rather than the person who signed the contract. On a planning project that is usually the architect or the agent, and they will remember exactly how many times the document came back.

Warning signs in a profile

Some things on a CV or a company profile should slow you down.

• Post-nominals that do not correspond to a recognised institute, or that cannot be found on any register.
• Claims about approval rates or outcomes, which no competent consultant makes.
• No named professional indemnity insurance position, or a limit well below the value of the decision the report supports.
• A portfolio of report extracts with no site-specific content, where the same paragraphs appear under different project names.
• Reluctance to name the individual who will do the work, or to put that name in the appointment.

None of these is conclusive on its own. Two together usually means the work will be subcontracted to someone you have not met.

Recording the check and using it later

Write down what you checked, when, and what you were told. A short file note naming the register you searched, the date, the membership grade and the reports you were shown takes two minutes.

That note has two uses. It supports your own professional position if the report is later challenged, and it gives the client a clear account of why this consultant was chosen over a lower quotation.

Where a draft needs a specialist author or a specialist sign-off, the professional directory is the route to a reviewer, and the report pages under planning documents set out which types carry a legal requirement for a licensed or competent professional rather than a recommendation. For specialist technical reports, qualified professional input may be required.

PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.