What to ask a consultant before you appoint them

Ask who will personally write the report, what the fee excludes, how many rounds of revision are included, and what level of professional indemnity insurance the firm carries. Those four questions separate a proposal you can rely on from one that will cost you more than the quote. Get the answers in writing before you appoint, because every one of them turns into a dispute later if it was only discussed on the phone.

This applies to any planning technical consultant: a planning agent, an ecologist, an acoustician, an arboriculturist, a transport planner or a structural engineer. The vocabulary changes. The commercial risks do not.

Who will actually do the work

A proposal signed by a director does not mean the director is writing it.

Ask for the name of the person who will survey the site and the name of the person who will write and check the report. Ask what their qualifications and professional memberships are, and whether the checker is different from the author. For reports where a licence or statutory competence is involved, ask to see the licence or the competency evidence rather than the firm's general statement.

The question to ask next is the one that reveals most: who signs it. A report signed by a chartered member of the relevant institute, who has visited the site, is a different document from one assembled by a graduate from someone else's notes. Both can be perfectly good. Only one of them is what you were sold.

Where a report has a legal competence requirement, this matters beyond quality. Protected species work and mitigation licences require a suitably licensed ecologist under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 and the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017, the statutory biodiversity metric is expected to be completed by a competent person under the Environment Act 2021 regime, and a fire statement at Planning Gateway One must be prepared by someone with fire engineering competence. Those are not matters you can take on trust.

Comparable projects and what happened to them

Ask for three comparable projects and the outcome of each. Not a client list.

Comparable means similar in scale, similar in constraint and in the same authority area if possible, because local validation practice and officer expectations differ. The outcome question is the useful half. A consultant who says two were approved, one was refused and here is what the inspector said about the refusal is telling you something. A consultant who says everything they touch gets approved is telling you something else.

Follow it with a specific question: has a report by this firm ever been rejected at validation or criticised by an officer or an auditor, and what changed afterwards. The honest answer is yes, occasionally, and here is how we handle it.

Where the evidence is likely to face an authority-commissioned review, ask whether the firm has responded to an audit before. The piece on peer review and second opinions on technical evidence covers why that experience is worth paying for.

Insurance level and exclusions

Professional indemnity insurance is the only thing standing between you and a loss if the advice is wrong.

Ask for the level of cover per claim, whether the policy is on an each-and-every-claim basis or in the aggregate, and whether the level is adequate for the value of the decision resting on the report. A £250,000 limit on a report underpinning a scheme worth several million is a mismatch worth discussing before rather than after.

Three further points people skip. Cover is usually written on a claims-made basis, so it is the policy in force when the claim is made that responds, not the one in force when the work was done, which makes run-off cover relevant if the firm ceases trading. Many policies exclude specific activities, so ask whether the work you are commissioning is within cover. And a sole practitioner nearing retirement is a different risk from a firm with a succession plan, however good the individual.

Ask for a certificate rather than a statement in a proposal.

What is excluded from the fee

The quote is for a defined scope. The arguments come from what sits outside it.

Ask explicitly whether each of these is included or extra:

• Topographical and measured building surveys.
• Third-party data purchases, record searches and licence fees.
• The planning application fee and portal charges.
• Site investigation, sampling and laboratory testing.
• Additional survey visits required by season, weather or an officer's request.
• Responding to consultee comments and objections during determination.
• Attendance at a planning committee.
• Appeal work, including a statement of case or proof of evidence.
• Revisions arising from a change of design by you or another consultant.

The last two are where budgets break. Appeal work is almost always excluded and is expensive, and a design change that invalidates a completed assessment means the assessment is done again at your cost.

Revision rounds included

Get a number. Two rounds of comment on a draft is a common and reasonable position, and anything described as "reasonable revisions" is an invitation to disagree.

Define what a round is: your comments and the other consultants' comments consolidated into one set, returned once. Define what happens after the included rounds, with an hourly or daily rate stated. And define what a revision is as against a new piece of work, because a change in the red line boundary or the unit count is the latter.

Where the authority asks for more information during determination, agree now who pays. A short response letter is usually within scope. Remodelling to a new methodology is not.

Programme, seasons and site access

Ask for a programme with dates, not durations, and ask what it depends on.

Survey seasons are the hard constraint on ecology and some other disciplines. Bat emergence surveys run from May to September, great crested newt environmental DNA sampling falls between mid-April and the end of June, botanical survey for the biodiversity baseline needs the growing season, and traffic counts are taken in neutral months avoiding August and December. Ask directly: if we instruct you in October, when is the earliest you can deliver, and what does that do to our application date.

Then ask what access the consultant needs, who arranges it, and what happens if a neighbour refuses. Surveys that need access to adjoining land are a common cause of delay, and nobody owns the problem unless the appointment says who does.

How the output will be reviewed

Decide before you appoint who checks the work, and against what.

For a straightforward document you may be reviewing it yourself. For a technical report with a legal competence requirement, review by a suitably qualified professional is the point of the exercise rather than an optional extra. Where a draft has been prepared by one party and is being signed by another, the scope of that sign-off needs stating, and the article on what a professional sign-off on an AI-assisted draft covers sets out what is and is not within it.

Ask for the deliverable format: a signed PDF, the figures as separate files, the model or metric file where one exists, and the underlying survey data. The data matters. If the relationship ends, the data is what lets someone else pick the work up without surveying again.

Finally, ask how complaints are handled and which institute the firm is accountable to. The RTPI, RICS, RIBA and CIEEM each publish codes of conduct and complaints routes, and a firm that volunteers its institute and complaints procedure is usually a firm that rarely needs it.

If you want a specialist to review a draft before it is submitted, the PlanScope professional directory is the route for a review request and sign-off, and pricing sets out what drafting documents yourself costs.

This is general guidance, not legal advice. Check the position with your local planning authority or a qualified professional before relying on it.

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.