What the GLA’s £250k Small Sites grant actually pays for: comparable-site evidence, not application-drafting

The GLA opened the Small Sites for Small Builders Site Release Fund on 12 May. It will spend up to £250,000 per applicant on feasibility work, draws 50% at outset and 50% on evidence of completed surveys, and closes for submissions at noon on 10 July. Eligible applicants are public landowners and Registered Providers. Eighteen landowners have already been supported under earlier rounds, and 72 sites have been released onto the GLA Small Sites Portal to date.

What the fund pays for, in the GLA’s own list: site investigations, due diligence, feasibility studies, and legal surveys. What it does not pay for: the OPS application itself. The line in between is where a number of applicants are going to find themselves explaining to an internal procurement lead why a £40,000 quote from a multi-disciplinary consultant covers everything except the analytical question every committee member is going to ask first, which is whether anything like this scheme has ever consented in this borough.

The five categories the fund is built around

The published fund framework lists five eligible work streams. Roughly, in the order an experienced applicant will sequence them:

1. Site investigations. Ground conditions, contamination, utilities, services. Standard scope, well-priced market.
2. Topographical and measured surveys. Specialist firms, three-week lead times, also a settled market.
3. Legal surveys. Title, encumbrances, easements, rights of way, registered burdens. The legal team you already use can scope and deliver this in two to four weeks.
4. Due diligence. The everything-else category. Highways, daylight/sunlight, ecology, heritage, flood risk, services capacity. Each one is a discrete consultant; the price is set; the timeline is set.
5. Feasibility studies. The category the rest of the fund hangs off.

The first four categories are commodified. Procurement officers know the consultants, know the fees, know the timelines. Where the fund does something unusual is the fifth one, and only at one specific layer of it.

What “feasibility” actually has to contain on a London small site

For a small residential-led site in London, the feasibility study covers three things in sequence: a design test (will a viable scheme fit on the plot), an economic test (will the scheme repay land, build and finance), and a planning test (will the scheme survive determination in this borough). All three matter, but the planning test is the one that quietly governs the other two. A design that fits and an economic model that closes are worth nothing if the local refusal-reason cluster lands on something the scheme cannot solve without going back to the start.

The planning test, done properly, is a comparable-evidence exercise. It is the question every chartered planning consultant builds an answer to in their head, in their borough, over the course of two decades. For an applicant team working on a shortlist of sites under a 10 July deadline, none of whom have two decades of borough-specific intuition in the room, the practical question is where that comparable-evidence layer actually comes from.

The five planning questions every applicant has to answer before the site appears in the OPS form

Across the dozens of London small-site briefs the Perfect Scale dataset has been built against, the planning test reduces, again and again, to five questions. They are not in any GLA guidance document. They are what shows up at committee, on the determination route choice, and on the appeal page when an applicant gets the framing wrong.

1. Does this site type clear committee in this borough? Approval rate is at site-type resolution (conversions, end-of-terrace infill, backland, rear extensions, mews, change-of-use), not borough resolution. The borough headline is misleading. The site-type number is the operative one.
2. At what density, and on what plot ratio? The density matrix that schemes have actually achieved on similar plots, plotted against site area. If the scheme is above the 90th-percentile achieved density for the site type, the feasibility narrative needs to explain why before the OPS form goes in.
3. What is the refusal-reason pattern, weighted to the site type? The ten-category refusal taxonomy is not uniform across site types within a borough. The dominant refusal reason for conversions in any given borough is rarely the dominant refusal reason for backland on the same patch.
4. Is the relevant pre-application advice scheme used here, and what does the data suggest about the lift it actually provides? The pre-application advice schemes operated by London boroughs vary widely in cost and posture. In a few of them, the dataset shows a meaningful approval-rate lift on schemes that took advice. In several others it shows close to no lift at all.
5. What is the conservation-area density penalty? Most London boroughs have one. Most boroughs do not quantify it. The dataset measures the achieved-density penalty inside conservation areas versus outside, by site type, with statistical significance flagged.

These five questions are exactly what the “feasibility study” line of the fund needs to underwrite. They are not what a topographical surveyor, a daylight consultant, an ecologist, a legal team, or a contamination engineer is paid to answer. They sit in the dataset, or they do not get answered.

Where this leaves an SSRF applicant in May 2026

There is roughly an eight-week window between the date the OPS portal opened and the date applications must be in. The work needs to be sequenced so that by 9 July, the application can show: a credible site, with a credible feasibility envelope, with a credible planning-survival narrative supported by comparable evidence from the same borough. The first half of that work is what every applicant team already has a budget line for. The second half is the new line.

Perfect Scale’s product set sits inside that second half. A £1,250 Site Assessment scopes a single named site against its borough’s comparable-evidence record. A £3,500 Bundle covers three full Borough Intelligence Reports for an applicant team triaging a shortlist across multiple councils. Both are sized to be procurement-card-sized purchases against a £250,000 grant draw, not budget events. The free borough dashboards at perfectscale.uk/boroughs are the headline layer for all 33 London boroughs, refreshed quarterly.

What we will not do

Perfect Scale does not draft OPS applications. We do not advise on grant eligibility, do not warrant compliance with the fund prospectus, and have no view on which scheme should or should not be put forward. The product is the planning-evidence layer. The application itself is for the applicant team and its retained advisors. If a council, ALMO, housing company or Registered Provider wants a thirty-minute call to scope which of their candidate sites are at-depth in the dataset and where the Bundle is the right shape of purchase against their shortlist, the discovery call link is on the /for-councils/ page.

Sources. Greater London Authority, “Small Sites for Small Builders Site Release Fund”, fund page (accessed 14 May 2026). Application platform: GLA OPS (ops.london.gov.uk). Small Sites Portal: apps.london.gov.uk/small-sites/. Submission deadline 12:00, 10 July 2026.