For councils & registered providers
The comparable-evidence layer under your Site Release Fund application.
The GLA’s Small Sites for Small Builders Site Release Fund will spend up to £250,000 per applicant on feasibility work between now and the 10 July submission deadline. Perfect Scale is what the planning-evidence half of that work has, by then, already cost.
If your shortlist is sitting on a London Borough Council, an ALMO, a wholly-owned housing delivery vehicle, or a Registered Provider
The Release Fund is open to public landowners (councils, GLA group partners, wholly-owned council housing companies) and Registered Providers of social housing. Private developers are excluded. Eligible applicants are working between now and 10 July to assemble shortlists of small residential-led sites that will stand up to feasibility and survive the GLA OPS submission.
The fund pays 50% at outset and 50% on evidence of completed surveys. Sites that pass are disposed via the GLA Small Sites Portal to SME builders. The 18 landowners already supported and 72 sites already released set the bar for what a credible application looks like.
What Perfect Scale is not. We do not draft OPS applications, advise on grant eligibility, or warrant compliance. We are the planning-evidence layer: what the borough has actually approved, refused, and conditioned on schemes like the ones on your shortlist over the past three years.
Reference: london.gov.uk/small-sites →
Three questions a feasibility report needs to answer before the site appears in the OPS form
Every applicant team will have the same three planning questions at the shortlist stage. The answers are sitting in the existing decision record for the borough, but they are not extractable from the borough’s own dashboard, the GLA register, or a private agent’s notes.
Does this site type clear committee in this borough?
Approval rate, by site type (conversion / end-of-terrace infill / backland / rear extension / mews / change-of-use), in the borough, across the past three years. The headline borough approval rate is misleading; the type-specific rate is what actually governs an application like yours.
At what density, and on what plot ratio?
The density matrix that approved schemes have actually achieved, plotted against site area, and the upper bound the borough has been willing to consent on similar plots. If your scheme is above the 90th-percentile achieved density for the type, the feasibility narrative needs to explain why.
What is the refusal-reason pattern?
The ten-category refusal taxonomy, weighted to the relevant site type. In Lambeth, conversion refusals have space-standards as the largest single coded category, with design among the next most common. That is the inverse of what most agents brief against. The borough-specific pattern is what your survey scope and design brief have to be calibrated against.
Three boroughs where the council itself is the most likely applicant
Most London boroughs now hold an in-house or wholly-owned development vehicle. For three of them, the vehicle is publicly active enough to make an SSRF application likely, and Perfect Scale already covers the borough at full depth.
Barking & Dagenham, Be First. 152 coded small-site applications; refusal pattern weighted toward design and amenity at the conversion end. Free dashboard at /boroughs/barking-and-dagenham/.
Hounslow, Lampton. 425 coded small-site applications; conservation-area coverage is a material refusal-reason driver, and the borough’s end-of-terrace pattern reads quite differently from its mews and backland pattern. Free dashboard at /boroughs/hounslow/.
Newham, Red Door Ventures. 384 coded small-site applications; the dataset surfaces which exact space-standards categories (gross internal area, single-aspect, daylight) recur on refused decisions. Free dashboard at /boroughs/newham/.
The free borough dashboards above carry the headline approval rate, refusal taxonomy and decision-routes data. Working together adds the per-site comparable evidence, the density matrix at site-type resolution, and the methodology document a feasibility report can be procured against.
Built by an architect, in the London policy world
Perfect Scale is run by Abre Etteh: ARB-registered architect, fourteen years across architecture, council planning and residential development. Author of the London Borough of Merton Small Sites Supplementary Planning Document, the policy framework councils now reference when assessing the kind of schemes the Release Fund will produce.
The methodology is open and published. The data comes from the GLA Planning Datahub and each council’s own register. Every refusal reason is coded into a ten-category taxonomy with verbatim references. Every finding is graded into one of four evidence tiers based on sample size and statistical significance. Where the data is thin, we say so.
The full methodology document is the diligence reference an applicant team can procure against. It is, deliberately, not a black box.
Discovery call for shortlists in the 10 July window
For councils, ALMOs, housing companies and Registered Providers actively assembling an SSRF shortlist before 10 July, a thirty-minute call covers: which of your candidate boroughs are at-depth in the dataset (all 33 are), which site types in your pipeline have the strongest comparable evidence, and what shape of evidence support best fits the shortlist. No grant-eligibility advice. Just the evidence layer.
Evidence for a multi-borough shortlist
For a shortlist that touches more than one council, we can pull together each borough at full evidence depth, typically inside a working week. The free dashboards are the right place to start; for anything beyond them, let’s talk about what your team needs.
All 33 London borough dashboards are free, with no sign-up, refreshed quarterly.