Who carries the risk when a planning draft is wrong

The answer is short and uncomfortable. Whoever signs the document carries the risk. Not the person who drafted it, not the software that assembled the first version, not the client who supplied the site information. Professional responsibility for planning documents attaches to the name on the front page and the declaration on the application form, and no drafting method changes that.

Which is worth saying plainly, because the question is usually asked as though the arrival of drafting tools created a new allocation of risk. It did not. It made an old one more visible.

Who the document belongs to once it is submitted

Two separate liabilities start running the moment a document goes in.

The first is contractual and professional: your duty to the client to exercise reasonable skill and care. That duty covers the content of the statement you produced for them, whatever process produced the first draft. A policy misquoted, a threshold misapplied, a site constraint missed. Those are your errors once you have put your name to them.

The second is statutory and narrower but sharper. Section 65 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 makes it an offence to issue a certificate, such as the ownership certificate on an application form, containing a statement known to be false or misleading in a material particular, or to do so recklessly. Section 194 does similar work for lawful development certificate applications. These are criminal provisions, and agents sign those certificates routinely without reading them.

The practical consequence is a habit rather than a policy. Read the declaration every time. Check the ownership position against the register rather than against what the client told you on the phone six weeks ago.

What professional codes require of the signer

The institutes converge on the same three obligations, expressed slightly differently.

Competence. The RTPI's code requires members to carry out work with competence, and the RICS rules of conduct and the RIBA code say the same in their own terms. If a document requires expertise you do not hold, you cannot cure that by having a draft in front of you. A well written draft of a noise assessment does not make you an acoustician.

Honesty about authorship and method. Members are required not to mislead. Presenting a document as your own professional assessment when you have not assessed anything is a conduct problem, and it is also the fastest way to lose a case at appeal when the inspector asks how a conclusion was reached.

Independence. Where you are advising rather than advocating, particularly on viability and on heritage balance, the code expects an objective view rather than the client's preferred one. This is where the pressure actually sits in practice.

None of that prohibits using drafting assistance. All of it requires you to be the author in substance: the person who decided what the document says, checked the facts and accepted the reasoning.

Insurance and the scope of cover

Professional indemnity policies respond to claims arising from negligent advice or design. They do not typically care which tools produced the words.

Where they do care, in ascending order of importance:

• The activity has to be within the business description on the policy. A planning consultancy that starts issuing ecology conclusions may be outside its own cover.
• Statements of fact you have adopted without verification are the classic uninsured problem, because the claim becomes one of fact rather than judgement.
• Non disclosure at renewal. If your firm's method of working has changed materially, the underwriter will expect to know at renewal, and answering the proposal form accurately is part of keeping the cover intact.
• Some policies contain exclusions for work outsourced or sub contracted without equivalent cover. Read how your policy treats drafting carried out outside your own team.

Ring your broker rather than guessing. The conversation takes ten minutes and the answer belongs in your file.

Describing the drafting process to a client

Clients are entitled to know how their document was produced, and being straightforward about it removes a whole category of later argument.

A description that works:

The first draft is assembled from structured site data and policy text, which gives a complete and correctly ordered document quickly. It is then reviewed and rewritten by the person who signs it. Site specific facts that cannot be verified from the data are flagged rather than invented, and those flags have to be resolved before submission. Where the report requires a licensed or competent professional, the draft is a starting point for that professional and not a substitute for them.

PlanScope's drafts work in exactly that way, inserting a to be confirmed marker wherever a site fact is missing. Leaving one of those markers in a submitted document is a validation problem. Filling one in with a plausible guess is a professional one, and it is the worse of the two.

One further point on client data. The site does not publish a privacy policy or terms, so the only safe statement about uploaded material is that you should check the current position on the site before uploading anything confidential. For a consultant handling a client's ownership documents or commercially sensitive appraisal inputs, that check belongs in your own data protection assessment rather than in an assumption.

Where review adds and where it does not

Review is good at some things and useless at others, and conflating the two is how firms get into trouble.

Review catches, reliably:

• Policy citations against the wrong edition of the Framework or a superseded local plan policy number.
• Internal inconsistency between the description of development, the drawings and the narrative.
• Missing sections against the authority's validation list.
• Thresholds applied to the wrong measure, such as floorspace where units were meant.
• Tone and length problems that make a document harder for an officer to use.

Review does not produce:

• Survey data. No amount of reading turns an absent bat survey into a present one.
• A site visit. The condition of a boundary hedge, the actual access visibility, the state of a listed building's rear elevation.
• Specialist judgement outside the reviewer's competence.
• Calculations that require a licensed tool or a licensed person, including the statutory biodiversity metric.

That last point has statutory force rather than being a matter of good practice. A Biodiversity Net Gain Assessment under the Environment Act 2021 regime expects the metric to be completed by a competent person, an Environmental Impact Assessment requires an Environmental Statement prepared by competent experts under the 2017 Regulations, and a Fire Statement at Planning Gateway One requires fire engineering competence under the Building Safety Act 2022 framework. For any of those, a draft is scaffolding.

Declining to sign, and how to say so

Consultants find this harder than it needs to be, so here is wording that works without damaging the relationship.

For competence: "This report needs an author who can stand behind the acoustic modelling, and that is not me. I can prepare everything around it and manage the specialist, but the assessment has to be signed by the acoustician."

For unverified facts: "I can submit this once the access visibility has been measured. At the moment the figure in the draft is an assumption, and if the highway officer tests it and it is wrong, the application fails and the fault is ours."

For a conclusion you do not hold: "I can set out the argument for less than substantial harm, and I will do it properly. I am not able to write that there is no harm, because the officer will not accept it and an inspector would not either."

Put it in writing the same day. A refusal recorded in an email is a defence. A refusal expressed in a phone call and then quietly worked around is not.

Where the work does need a specialist, the professional directory is one route to a reviewer who can take that part of the document, and the review request flow records who signed off what.

Practical wording for engagement letters

Six clauses worth having, whatever your firm's standard form says:

1. Scope, stated positively and negatively. What the document covers and what it expressly does not, naming the specialist reports excluded.
2. Client supplied information. A statement that you rely on the accuracy of information provided, with the material items listed rather than referred to generally.
3. Method. A short, honest description of how drafts are produced and reviewed, so the client cannot later say they were misled about it.
4. Verification responsibilities. Which facts you will check and which the client must confirm, with the site survey position spelled out.
5. Third party reliance. Whether anyone other than the client may rely on the document, and a statement that reliance by others is not permitted without your written agreement.
6. Liability cap and the insurance position, expressed in a way your insurer has seen.

The last one carries a caveat worth stating: a cap that is unreasonable may not be enforceable, and caps interact with consumer protection rules where your client is an individual homeowner rather than a business. Take your own advice on the drafting rather than copying a clause from a precedent of unknown origin.

The honest uncertainty in all of this is how the institutes will treat drafting assistance as it becomes ordinary. As at September 2026 the codes do not address it by name, and they do not need to: competence, honesty and independence already cover the ground. That may change, and it is worth watching the guidance your own institute publishes rather than assuming the position is settled.

This is general guidance, not legal advice, and it is not advice on your insurance. Check your policy wording and your institute's current code, or take professional advice, 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. If you want to see how the tiers compare before deciding how drafting fits your practice, the pricing page sets out what each includes.