Signing off a draft: the reviewer's declaration

Signing a report you did not write is an act with legal weight, and the declaration you attach to it is the only place you get to define what you are taking on. When a reviewer signs an AI-assisted draft, or a junior colleague's work, or a client's own document, the local planning authority and the world outside read that signature as a statement that a competent professional has applied judgement to the content. Your insurer reads it the same way.

That is manageable, provided the declaration says what you actually did.

What a signature asserts

At minimum, a signature on a planning report asserts four things. That you are competent in the subject matter. That you have reviewed the content and it reflects your professional judgement. That the methodology used is appropriate to the question. And that the conclusions follow from the evidence presented.

It does not, on its own, assert that you gathered the data. But an unqualified signature invites the reader to assume you did, and where the report is silent about provenance, that assumption is reasonable. The fix is not to sign more cautiously in private. It is to say in the document where each input came from.

For report types where a licensed or competent professional is legally required, the signature does more. A Biodiversity Net Gain assessment under the Environment Act 2021 regime expects the statutory metric to be completed by a competent person. Protected species work 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. An Environmental Statement under the Environmental Impact Assessment Regulations 2017 must be prepared by competent experts. In those cases your signature is the competence evidence, and it cannot be qualified away.

Author of record against reviewer

These are different roles with different exposure, and the document should say which one you occupy.

The author of record prepared the content, selected the methodology, carried out or commissioned the fieldwork and stands behind the whole document. The reviewer received a document prepared by someone else and applied their judgement to it. A council validating an application generally wants the author of record identified by name and qualification, because that is who the report can be tested against.

Where an AI-assisted draft has been reviewed and adopted, the honest structure is that the reviewer becomes the author of record for the professional content, and the draft origin is stated. PlanScope drafts are AI-assisted, structured to UK planning policy, and insert a to-be-confirmed flag wherever site-specific facts are missing rather than inventing them. Those flags are the reviewer's worklist, and a report that goes out with any of them still in place has not been reviewed.

There is a separate question of whether an authority will accept the report at all given who prepared it, and the rules on that differ by report type. The position on rejecting a report because of its author is worth reading before you take on a review for an unfamiliar client.

Liability for inputs you did not gather

The most common exposure in review work is data you accepted without checking. A survey date. A measured level. A habitat classification from someone else's walkover. A background sound level from a monitoring exercise you were not present at.

You cannot verify everything, and pretending otherwise is why declarations become fiction. Handle it by classifying inputs explicitly in the report:

• Inputs you produced or supervised.
• Inputs produced by a named third party that you have reviewed for reasonableness but not reproduced.
• Inputs supplied by the client and relied on without independent verification, listed individually.
• Inputs that remain outstanding, with the survey or investigation needed to close them.

The fourth category is the one that protects you. A report that names the missing work, says what it would resolve and states that the conclusions are provisional pending it is a defensible document. A report that quietly smooths over the gap is not.

Wording that limits scope honestly

A limitation clause works when it is specific and fails when it is a blanket disclaimer. "This report is provided without warranty" is worth very little. A clause that identifies the boundary of the instruction is worth a great deal.

Useful limitations name the thing: the survey season the work was carried out in and the seasons not covered, the parts of the building that were not accessible, the depth to which ground conditions were investigated, the version of a policy document the assessment was made against, and the date after which the conclusions should be revisited.

What a limitation cannot do is disclaim competence you have asserted. If you sign as the competent person for a statutory metric, you cannot then say the metric outputs are unverified. Pick one.

Keep the declaration and the limitations in the same place in every report you issue. Reviewers who scatter caveats through the text find, when a document is picked apart, that the caveats were read as decoration.

What insurers expect from review instructions

Professional indemnity cover generally responds to negligent advice, and review work is advice. Three points recur in the conditions insurers attach.

First, that the instruction is in writing and defines the scope of the review. A verbal request to "have a look at this" that ends in a signature is the worst version of this work.

Second, that the reviewer's role is disclosed to the person relying on the report. Undisclosed sign-off, where the client presents the reviewer as the author and the reviewer knows it, creates problems that no limitation clause solves.

Third, that fees bear some relation to the risk. A review priced at a fraction of the cost of preparing the report, on a document that carries the same liability as one you wrote, is a commercial decision your insurer may ask about. Reading a fee proposal's scope and exclusions from the other side of the table is a useful exercise before you set your own.

Conflicts sit alongside all of this. Where you have a prior relationship with the applicant, the site or another party to the application, that needs declaring in the report rather than resolved privately, and the ordinary rules on declaring conflicts of interest apply to review work exactly as they do to authorship.

When further survey must precede signature

Some gaps cannot be reviewed away, and a reviewer who signs across them is signing something untrue.

Seasonal survey constraints are the clearest case. Bat emergence surveys run from May to September, with the optimal window narrower than that. Great crested newt environmental DNA sampling runs from mid-April to the end of June. Reptile surveys need suitable temperatures in spring or early autumn. If the assessment depends on a survey that has not been done and cannot be done until next season, the report says so and the conclusion is qualified accordingly.

The same applies to intrusive ground investigation. A Phase 1 desk study that identifies a plausible contaminant linkage cannot be converted into a clean bill of health by a reviewer. It needs a Phase 2 investigation carried out in accordance with BS 10175 by suitably qualified and experienced persons.

Say no to these instructions in writing. A reviewer who declines and explains why is doing the job.

An illustrative example

An arboriculturist is asked to review and sign a tree report drafted from a desk study, supporting a rear extension close to two mature limes. The draft carries the stem diameters as estimates and flags the root protection area calculation as provisional. The reviewer cannot sign it as an impact assessment without measured diameters and a site inspection of condition. What they can do is issue a short scoping note confirming the constraint is real, the survey required and the likely design implication, then sign the full assessment after the visit. This example is illustrative.

Records to keep after sign-off

Keep the version you reviewed as well as the version that was issued. Keep the instruction, the correspondence in which you raised queries, the client's responses, and any data you were given. Keep a note of what you checked and what you accepted on trust, dated.

Retention periods follow your insurer's requirements rather than planning timescales, and planning timescales can be long. An enforcement question about a condition discharged from your report can surface years later, and the reviewer who kept the file is in a very different position from the one who did not.

Reviewers who take on sign-off work through PlanScope's professional directory see the request statuses move from sent to accepted, in review, and then to changes requested, signed off or rejected. Use changes requested. It exists so that a review can send work back rather than force a binary choice between signing something incomplete and refusing the instruction.

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. This is general guidance, not legal or insurance advice. Check your own professional body's code and your policy wording before relying on it.