Urban Planners Editing and Proofreading Services

A planning application is refused, and the reason is not that the scheme was bad. It is that the supporting statement described the development at length and never engaged with the three policies the decision would actually turn on. The case officer had to construct the applicant's argument for them, under time pressure, from a document that assumed the merits were self-evident.

We edit what planning consultants produce — planning and design and access statements, policy compliance assessments and their structure, pre-application submissions and responses, appeal statements and grounds of appeal, consultation and engagement reports, planning obligation and condition negotiations, committee report responses and speaking notes, technical assessment summaries for non-specialists, allocation and site promotion representations, and correspondence with case officers and consultees. Our editors work on the statement a case officer has to write their report from.

The planning statement's policy engagement is where an application is either easy to recommend or easy to refuse, and its failure is describing the proposal instead of addressing the tests. A case officer writes a report structured around policies; a statement structured around the scheme's virtues gives them nothing to lift. We work through these so the statement identifies the policies the decision genuinely turns on — usually three or four — and addresses each in its own section under its own heading, since this is the structure of the officer's report and matching it is the single most useful thing an applicant can do; so each policy is quoted in the relevant part rather than referenced, with the specific test it sets out and then the evidence that the scheme meets it; so any policy the scheme does not comply with is addressed openly with the argument for why permission should still be granted, given that a conflict discovered by the officer is a refusal and one acknowledged by the applicant is a balancing exercise; so the objections already known — from the consultation, from the pre-application response, from the neighbours — are answered specifically rather than in general terms; so the conditions the applicant would accept are offered, as an officer with a workable condition can recommend approval where they would otherwise refuse; so the technical evidence is summarised in the statement with the conclusions rather than left to the appendices; and so the planning balance is set out explicitly. Statements written this way get recommended for approval.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including applications, technical reports and client information. We are editors rather than planners, and we offer no view on policy, planning merits or the likely outcome. What we can do is give the case officer a document they can build a report from.