Accountability
Someone’s name is on it.
This is the part that makes Wren a different kind of company from the AI planning tools, and it is the part that is hardest to copy. Every submission is signed by a chartered professional, in their own name, under their own membership number, with their own indemnity behind it.
Who can sign
Eight chartered bodies.
Membership is verified by a person against the body's public register before an account can sign anything. It is checked, not declared.
Professional indemnity cover is recorded with its insurer, its policy number and its expiry date, and the expiry is computed fresh every time the page renders, so a policy that lapsed overnight says so the next morning without anything having had to run.
A professional whose verification is still pending can look around the portal and can do nothing that puts their name on a document. That is enforced where the action happens, not by hiding a button.
The declaration
Two attestations. Not four.
It used to be four boxes plus a typed statement plus a membership number to re-key.
- 1
I have reviewed this document in full, I am satisfied it represents competent professional work, and I accept responsibility for its contents.
- 2
I have added my signature and date to the document.
Four boxes asserting overlapping halves of one professional judgement are not four decisions. They are one decision with three extra clicks, and a form that asks a chartered planner to retype a membership number the system already holds invites a typo into the one field where a typo matters.
The second attestation earns its place because it asserts something genuinely different. Wren can verify that a file was uploaded and take a checksum of it. It cannot read whether a name and a date were written inside it. Only the signatory knows that, so only the signatory can attest to it, and a signed document that turns out to bear no signature is a validation failure at the council and a hole in the record years later.
Both are required by the route that records the signature, not merely by the form. The interface decides what is easy. The route decides what is possible.
The record
What is written down at the moment of signing
Enough to answer, years later, exactly what was signed and by whom.
- The signatory
- Name and roleThe individual, not the company.
- Their standing
- Chartered body and membership numberTaken from the verified record, never retyped at signing.
- The document
- Version and checksumA SHA-256 of the exact bytes of the file they uploaded. Not of a template, and not of a draft.
- The moment
- Time, address and deviceWith the authentication method used.
- The intent
- The attestations, verbatimStored as agreed, so a later revision of the wording cannot rewrite what somebody actually signed.
A signature recorded against a document that does not bear the signatory’s details would be a record of something that did not happen.
So signing is refused outright until the professional has uploaded their own version of the document. The greyed-out button is only the courteous half of that. What is actually signed is their file, by its bytes.
Release
Why you cannot read a draft before it is signed.
You can see that it exists, and where it has got to, from the first minute. Its contents are released when it is signed.
There is a commercial reason and it is obvious enough to state: a customer who can download an unsigned draft can charge back the fee and file it themselves.
The professional reason matters more. An unsigned draft is a proposal to a chartered planner. A customer acting on one is holding a document that carries a case reference and a professional format, and that no professional has stood behind. That is worse for them than having nothing.
The line sits at signed rather than at approved, deliberately. Approved means a reviewer is content with a draft. Signed means somebody has put their membership number on it. Only one of those is a commitment.
Second signature
One document a planner cannot sign alone.
An Affordable Housing Statement needs a second signature from a RICS-registered valuer or equivalent.
Whether a contribution is payable is a planning question, and a chartered planner answers it. What a scheme can bear is a viability appraisal, which is a separate discipline with its own evidential standards and its own professional exposure. Neither should sign for the other.
The requirement travels with the document rather than sitting in a policy somewhere: it is written into the text near the front and again in the conclusion, it is stored on the document record, and the review queue blocks sign-off rather than relying on somebody reading the paragraph.
Start here
Then it comes to you, and stops.
A signature is a professional standing behind the work. It is not authority to file an application in your name. Only you can give that.