What a reviewer checks before signing off a draft

Signing off a drafted report means adopting it as your own professional work, with your name, your competence and your professional indemnity cover behind every statement in it. Professional sign off ai report requests are increasingly common, and the reviewer's position is straightforward once the distinction is clear: you are not certifying that a document was drafted well. You are certifying conclusions you have satisfied yourself of.

That framing decides everything else, including the fee.

What signing off actually means

There is no separate category of liability for a document you did not draft. A report issued under your name is your report.

That means the methodology described in it is the methodology you adopt, the data relied on is data you accept, and the conclusions are yours. If a survey date is wrong, you stated a wrong survey date. If the assessment applied a correction you would not have applied, you applied it.

Reviewers sometimes try to manage this with wording that describes the document as reviewed rather than authored. That helps with expectation setting and does very little for liability, because the person relying on the document, whether a local planning authority or an applicant, relies on the professional judgement your name carries.

The practical consequence is that a review does not cost as much less than authorship as clients expect. On a well prepared draft with sound data it is faster. On a draft with no field data behind it, it is not a review at all.

Scope of review and what sits outside it

Define the scope in writing before starting, and define it by exclusion as well as inclusion.

A scope that works on most technical documents covers:

• the methodology, against the applicable standard and its current edition
• the data, including its provenance, dates and validity period
• the calculations or model inputs and their assumptions
• the interpretation and the conclusions
• the policy references, against the editions in force
• the internal consistency of the document with the drawings and application form

What usually sits outside: the accuracy of third party survey data you did not commission and cannot verify, the design decisions of the wider team, matters requiring a different competence, and anything that would need site work you have not been instructed to carry out.

Put the exclusions in the document itself as well as in the appointment. A reader who knows which parts you verified can rely on the document properly, and a reader who does not will assume you verified everything.

Data the reviewer has to verify independently

Some items cannot be taken on trust, and the list is shorter than reviewers fear.

Survey dates, weather conditions and surveyor names, because without those a field based conclusion has no foundation. Calibration records for any instrumentation. The version of any model, emission factor set, or assessment software used. The site boundary against the application drawing, because assessments are routinely carried out on an earlier red line. The constraint position from the published datasets rather than from the draft's description of it. And the editions of any standard and any policy document cited.

Each of those is a ten minute check and each has sunk reports. A noise assessment with background levels measured at a position that is no longer representative of the nearest receptor, because the layout changed, is the classic case, and the layout change is visible in the drawing register.

Where a draft carries flags marking missing site specific facts, treat those as the start of the review rather than as an inconvenience. PlanScope drafts insert "[TO BE CONFIRMED]" wherever a fact is absent rather than inventing one, and a document arriving with those flags intact tells you exactly which items need field data.

Methodology statements that cannot be inherited

A methodology section describes what somebody did. Adopting one you did not carry out is the point at which a review becomes untenable.

Three cases arise repeatedly. Where the draft describes a site visit, a survey or a measurement exercise, and none took place, the section has to be deleted or the work carried out. Where it describes a method you would not have used, you either rewrite it to the method actually applied or you decline. And where the method depends on professional judgement exercised in the field, such as the identification of an acoustic feature or the assessment of habitat condition, the judgement cannot be adopted at second hand.

Rewriting a methodology section to reflect what was actually done is normal review work. Signing one that describes work nobody did is not a review problem. It is a professional conduct problem.

Reports where a licensed or competent person is required by law

Some documents cannot be signed off as a review of a draft at all, because the legislation requires the work itself to be done by a particular person.

An environmental statement under the Environmental Impact Assessment Regulations 2017 must be prepared by competent experts. A protected species survey and any mitigation licence require a suitably licensed ecologist under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 and the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017. A biodiversity net gain assessment under the Environment Act 2021 regime expects the statutory metric to be completed by a competent person. Land contamination reporting is expected to follow BS 10175 and to be prepared by suitably qualified and experienced persons. A fire statement at Planning Gateway One needs fire engineering competence.

For those, a drafted document is a starting point for the professional's own work, not something to be adopted. The honest answer to a sign off request in that category is a quote for the work, not a quote for a review. What competence means in each case is set out in our note on what a professional sign off commits the signatory to.

Recording the review and its limits

Keep a file that would make sense to a third party two years later.

1. The appointment and the agreed scope, including exclusions.
2. The version of the draft received, dated, retained unaltered.
3. A checklist of the items verified, with the source of each verification.
4. The queries raised and the responses received, in writing.
5. The changes made, and any change requested and refused.
6. The final issued version and the date.
7. Any matter you were unable to verify, and how it is dealt with in the document.

Item five matters most in a dispute. A reviewer who asked for a survey to be repeated and was refused, and who then qualified the document accordingly, is in a different position from one who raised nothing. The mechanics of the declaration itself are covered in our note on signing off a draft and the reviewer's declaration.

Where a reviewer should decline

Four situations where declining is the correct answer.

Where the conclusion sought is fixed before the work. A client asking for a review that concludes no adverse effect has asked for something other than a review.

Where the document falls outside your competence, even partly. Partial competence is not a basis for signing a whole document, and splitting it into two signed sections is better than stretching.

Where the underlying data does not exist and cannot be obtained before the deadline. Seasonal survey constraints mean this is common, and the answer is a programme conversation rather than a qualified document.

And where the fee does not cover the verification the scope requires. That is not squeamishness. A review priced at two hours on a document needing a day of checking produces exactly the kind of sign off that damages the person who gave it.

Fee scopes that match the work

Price the verification, not the page count.

A structure that works: a fixed fee for an initial appraisal of the draft and the data, which establishes whether a review is possible at all and is payable whatever the answer. Then a second stage fee for the review itself, scoped once the gaps are known. Any field work is quoted separately as field work.

That two stage structure protects both sides. The client learns early whether they are buying a review or a commission, and the reviewer is not committed to a fee agreed before the document was seen. PlanScope's review request flow tracks a request through the statuses sent, accepted, in review, changes requested, signed off, rejected and expired, and "changes requested" is the status doing the most useful work, because it records the gap rather than papering over it. Reviewers listed in the professional directory receive requests through that route, and the practical discipline is described in our note on peer review and sign off, and what a reviewer takes on.

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, and for several report types a licensed or competent professional is legally required, with the draft serving only as a starting point for that professional's own work. This is general guidance and not legal advice, so check the position with your professional body and your insurer before relying on it.