The hard stop
Nothing is filed until you say so.
An application is a legal instrument submitted in your name. Wren drafts it and a chartered planner signs it, and neither of those is authority to file it. Only you can give that, so the journey stops after sign-off and waits.
Three things
What makes the approval mean something
01
Only you can give it
Not a case manager, not an administrator, not the professional who signed it. The database enforces the same rule independently of the code, which means a helpful staff-side approve on their behalf feature cannot be added by accident later.
02
It names exactly what you approved
A checksum is taken across the specific documents and versions you were shown, and sent back with your approval. If anything has been re-drafted or re-signed since the page loaded, the checksums differ and the approval is refused rather than quietly applied to a different pack. An approval that does not name what was approved is worthless as evidence.
03
The evidence is written before the status moves
And it cannot be changed afterwards. If the status update then fails, your approval still stands and a retry resumes from it, but only for the same person approving the same pack. The failure mode is approved but not yet submitted. It is never submitted but not approved.
The words
What you actually agree to
Stored verbatim on every approval, so a later revision of the wording cannot rewrite what somebody agreed to.
I have reviewed every document in this submission pack. I confirm the information in it is correct to the best of my knowledge, that I am the applicant or am authorised to act for them, and I instruct Wren to submit this application to the local planning authority on my behalf. I understand that knowingly making a false statement on a planning application is a criminal offence.
It is deliberately plainer than the rest of this product. This is the sentence that has to hold up if an application is later challenged, so it says what is actually happening without the reassurance everything else is written in.
Enforcement
It is a lock in the database, not a check in the code.
Which is a distinction worth explaining, because it is the difference between a rule and an intention.
Every write that moves a case past payment runs with elevated privileges, and elevated privileges bypass the ordinary permission system. So an ordinary permission rule could not have gated this at all: it would have been silently skipped by exactly the code paths that matter.
Database triggers still fire for those writes. So the gate is a trigger, which makes submitted without approval genuinely unreachable, including from an administrator’s console session, from a scheduled job, or from a future feature that forgets to check.
The route is the sanctioned way through the gate. The trigger is what makes every other way impossible.
What happens next
Approving does not file it.
It authorises the filing, and those are different days.
An earlier version of this moved a case straight from your approval to submitted, which meant that the instant you clicked approve your case claimed to be lodged with the council, before anybody had filed anything.
So there is now a stage between the two, called Approved, and it is the real interval between authorising the filing and the filing happening. Your planner completes the council’s own forms, pays the fee and lodges the pack, and only that action marks it submitted.
From the moment you approve, every signed document is yours to download and keep, whatever happens afterwards.
Start here
After that, it is the council's process.
Validation, consultation, assessment, decision. Each one recorded on your file as it happens, with an email when the stage you are on changes.