00the listThe eight tests, and what each one settles
One document, eight answers, no essays
Feasibility is not a report you commission to feel better about a decision you have already taken. It is eight tests, run in parallel, each with an answer short enough to read out at a funding meeting. Where a test cannot be settled inside the fee, we say so, and we say what would settle it.
| Test | What it answers | What firms it up |
|---|---|---|
| Ground | What is under the slab, and whether it was ever something else. | A desk study first, then trial pits where the desk study is vague. |
| Services | What crosses the plot and who owns it. | Utility searches, then a trial hole over anything that matters. |
| Levels and access | How the site is entered, and where the water goes. | A topographical survey read against the adopted highway levels. |
| Consent position | How long determination is running, and what tends to attach to it. | The authority’s own published determination times for that use class. |
| Abnormals | What the awkward parts add to the works. | A priced schedule from the cost consultant, carried as a range. |
| Outline cost plan | What the building costs before anyone tenders it. | Tender returns on schemes of the same build type and storey height. |
| First programme | When the scheme could finish, and what it hangs on. | A dated bar chart with determination drawn in, not a duration. |
| Funding drawdown | Whether the money arrives in the weeks it is needed. | The drawdown profile laid straight over the first programme. |
Run them in parallel and the answers arrive together, which is the only way they can be read against each other. Run them in sequence and the ground investigation finishes after the cost plan has already been written on guesswork.
01siteWhat the ground is hiding
The most expensive unknown on a Manchester plot
Greater Manchester has been built on, dug up and filled back in for two centuries. Plenty of plots that look like open ground are old yards, old works, or the cleared footprint of something larger. Made ground is the usual finding, and made ground is expensive because it does not carry load the way the frame designer assumed when the scheme was sketched.
So the ground test starts with the record rather than the machine. Historic mapping, the old drainage layouts, the record of what stood there and what came down. That reading tells the geotechnical engineer where to put the trial pits, and a pit in the right place is worth four in the wrong one.
What comes back changes the scheme rather than decorating it. Deeper foundations to part of the footprint change the frame, the frame changes the cost plan, and the cost plan changes the number you take to the funder. Otherwise you carry an allowance for something nobody has measured, and that allowance is either too small to be useful or too large to let the scheme stack up.
02timeThe consent position, read as weeks
We test the clock, not the argument
Feasibility does not try to win the planning argument. Your architect, and on a difficult site a planning consultant, do that. What feasibility tests is the clock: how long determination is actually running at that authority for that kind of application, and what usually attaches to a consent once it is granted.
That matters because the clock sits on the critical path and almost nothing else does at this stage. A scheme that could be built in fifty weeks can still take ninety if determination runs long and the conditions attached to it need surveys nobody has commissioned. The funding has to survive that, and funding is usually the thing that cannot wait.
The written answer here is a range with a reason attached, never a single date. If the range makes the drawdown impossible, that is a finding worth having in week six, and it goes into the document in the same plain words as everything else.
03moneyWhy the cost plan is a range
A range you can bank beats a figure from nowhere
At feasibility nobody has tendered anything. A single figure at this stage is a guess wearing a suit, and the harm it does is that it gets quoted for the next eighteen months as though it had been priced. So the outline cost plan comes as a range, with the abnormals carried separately and the contingency shown as its own line rather than smuggled into the rates.
Each range narrows as evidence lands. Trial pits narrow the substructure. The topographical survey narrows the drainage and the external works. A firm frame choice narrows the superstructure. By the time the scheme goes out to tender the range has usually closed to something you can commit against, and you will have watched it close rather than being handed a new number.
Every figure in the document says where it came from. That is the difference between a cost plan and a wish, and it is the first thing a funder’s monitoring surveyor asks for.
04answerWhat a no reads like
Written in the same tone as a yes
A negative feasibility is not a failure of the exercise. It is the exercise working, in the only phase cheap enough to absorb it. The document says which of the eight tests came back against the scheme, by how much, and what would have to change for the answer to move.
Three things can usually change: the scheme itself, the land price, or the funding structure. Sometimes two of them together. We say which, and we say plainly when the answer is none of them. In short, a no with reasons is worth more than a maybe with adjectives, because you can act on it the same week you read it.
Either way, the document is yours. If the site comes back around in two years with a different use in mind, the eight answers are still on file and most of them are still true.