What a professional review of a draft report covers

A professional review of a drafted report is an instruction to form your own opinion on someone else's document and to put your name to it. That is a narrower job than writing the report and a wider exposure than most people assume, because the signature transfers the reader's reliance from the drafter to the reviewer. Councils, funders and neighbours read the name at the bottom, not the tool that produced the text.

So the first thing a review instruction needs is a scope that says what you are checking and, just as clearly, what you are not.

What review is, and what it is not

Three different instructions get called review, and mixing them up is where disputes start.

Verification checks that the document says what the underlying data says. Did the survey happen on the date stated, do the monitoring locations match the plan, does the calculation reproduce.

Technical review goes further and asks whether the method was appropriate and whether the conclusions follow. This is the instruction most sign-off requests actually mean.

Authorship is producing the assessment yourself, including the site work. A reviewer who visits the site, redoes the calculation and rewrites the conclusions has become the author, and should be paid and insured accordingly.

Say in the acceptance email which of the three you are doing. A reviewer who signs a technical review while privately treating it as verification is exposed on every input they did not check.

Checking method against the governing standard

Every technical report has a governing document, and the review starts there rather than with the text.

An acoustic assessment is checked against the standard for rating industrial and commercial sound, and against the guidance on planning and noise, with attention to the rating penalties applied and how the background level was derived. A tree report is checked against the British Standard for trees in relation to design, demolition and construction, with attention to category assignments and root protection area calculations. An ecological appraisal is checked against the professional institute's impact assessment guidelines and the survey seasons.

The questions are consistent across disciplines. Was the right standard applied, in its current edition. Were the survey conditions within the standard's requirements. Where the author departed from the standard, is the departure stated and justified. Are the assumptions listed, and are they reasonable for this site.

Departures are worth dwelling on. A departure that is declared and reasoned is often fine. A departure that is not mentioned is the one that fails at appeal.

Verifying the site-specific inputs

This is where AI-drafted material needs particular attention, and where honest drafting helps rather than hinders.

A well-behaved draft flags the facts it does not have rather than inventing them, leaving explicit markers where site data is missing. The reviewer's job is to make sure none of those markers survive into the submitted version, and that whatever replaced them came from a real source.

Work through a fixed list:

1. Site address, application boundary and the drawing numbers and revisions the report refers to.
2. Survey dates, personnel and equipment, with calibration where the discipline requires it.
3. Receptor locations, and whether they match the ones a council officer would choose.
4. Baseline data provenance, with the date it was downloaded or supplied.
5. Any figure quoted from a third party, traced back to the third party.
6. Photographs, checked for date and direction rather than accepted at face value.

The fifth item catches most errors. Numbers migrate between documents in a project and acquire authority on the way, and the review is often the first time anyone asks where a figure came from.

Policy and citation checks

Policy references date faster than technical ones.

Check that the National Planning Policy Framework is cited by its current edition, and that the citation matches how the current edition is organised rather than reproducing older paragraph numbering. Check that local plan policies quoted are the adopted ones and not policies from an emerging plan or a superseded document. Check that supplementary planning documents referred to are still in force.

Where the report relies on an appeal decision, read it. Appeal decisions are indicative of how inspectors have approached an issue, not binding precedent, and a report that presents one as settling the matter overstates its case.

Then check the citations resolve. A reference to a standard that has been withdrawn, or to a guidance note superseded two years ago, is the sort of thing a consultee spots immediately.

Recording the review and its limits

Write a review record, even when the instruction does not ask for one. It is the document that protects you.

It should name the documents reviewed with their version numbers and dates, state the scope of the review, list the queries raised and how they were resolved, and set out the limitations: what was not checked, what was accepted from others without verification, and any assumption the opinion depends on.

Keep the marked-up version you worked from. Where the author makes changes in response, review the changes rather than the whole document again, and record that you did so.

Where you sign off through a formal review process, the declaration wording matters. Read it before accepting the instruction, not at the point of signing, because a declaration that asserts more than you checked is not one you can qualify afterwards. The wider question of what a reviewer takes on is covered in the article on peer review and sign-off.

Declining to sign

Refusing is part of the job, and a reviewer who has never declined is probably not reviewing.

The grounds are limited and each should be stated plainly in writing:

• The work falls outside your competence or your licence, which is decisive for report types where a licensed or competent professional is legally required.
• The information supplied is insufficient to form an opinion, and the gap has not been filled after a request.
• The method is wrong in a way the author will not correct.
• A conflict of interest exists that cannot be managed, which is dealt with in the article on declaring conflicts of interest in planning reports.

Decline in writing, with reasons, and keep the correspondence. A client who then finds another signatory has done so knowing your view, and that matters if the report is challenged.

Authorship rules are a separate question from competence, and councils can reject a report on the basis of who prepared it regardless of who reviewed it. That position is set out in when a council can reject a report because of its author.

Fee basis for a review instruction

Price the review on time, with a stated assumption about the number of iterations included, usually one round of comments and one re-review.

Fixed fees work badly here because the effort depends entirely on the quality of what arrives. A clean draft with complete appendices takes a fraction of the time of one missing its raw data, and the reviewer has no control over which turns up.

Two clauses earn their place in the terms. One entitling you to charge separately if the document is materially rewritten between versions. One making clear that the review does not extend to matters outside the named scope, listed explicitly.

Reviewers accepting work through the professional directory should set those terms once and reuse them. Browse the report types by category to see which ones are labelled as requiring a professional and which as recommending one.

For report types where a licensed or competent professional is legally required, an AI-assisted draft is a starting point for that professional rather than a substitute. This is general guidance, not legal advice. PlanScope provides AI-assisted draft reports for planning applications. Reports should be reviewed before submission. We do not guarantee planning approval.