£21.8m Council Housebuilding Support Fund: Use RenKap to Unlock Your Pipeline for Less
On 21 September 2026, Homes England opened bidding for £21.8m through the Council Housebuilding Support Fund (CHSF). Bids for this round close on 2 November 2026, with funding decisions from December 2026. The fund pays for the internal capacity and pre-development work required to prepare your pipeline and bid for the £39bn Social and Affordable Homes Programme (SAHP). In MHCLG’s Small Site Accelerator pilot, RenKap showed how councils can use PropTech to take raw sites to de-risked, design-feasible concepts at scale.
What This Fund Covers
The CHSF runs until March 2029, with further bidding rounds in April 2027 and 2028. Homes England expects the fund to help around 75 councils prepare and submit capital bids to the £39bn SAHP. Under the fund, councils can bid for five activities:
- knowledge and skills development
- housing pipeline development
- pre-development and enabling activities
- partnership working
- additional staffing capacity
How RenKap Can Support Councils with Their Bids
RenKap is a Proptech Platform – We help streamline the process of tendering, procuring, managing and alaysing the data from all the on site technical surveys such as topo, ecology, tree surveys, utility surveys and many more – all through one streamlined platform.
In H1 2026, RenKap won MHCLG Proptech funding to validate our model. Our project was called the Small Site Accelerator. We worked with four councils (Lewisham, Lambeth, Wigan and Bristol) across 30 sites to prove out a much more efficient way to take a raw site through a de-risked and design feasible concept with minimal time, resource and external expertise required.
RenKap streamlined the de-risking element and our tech partner Blocktype produced instant design feasible massings. The pilot was a success and delivered:
- £22k saving per site
- 90% resource saving
- 4.3 months from the pre-planning stage
Councils can use the Small Site Accelerator to boost internal development capacity and unlock a pipeline of de-risked and design-feasible sites with a fraction of the time and resources previously required.
With us you can demonstrate innovation to Homes England whilst showing them that you can make their money go much much further – increasing your chances of a successful bid.
How can This Work in Practice?
In the Small Site Accelerator, RenKap worked alongside Blocktype, a platform that produces site layouts in minutes. Together we tested one idea: proving out a clear, affordable path from raw site to de-risked, design-feasible concept.
RenKap identified and mitigated each site’s risks before it went too far. Blocktype then showed what could realistically be built on it incorporating site constraints from RenKap.
Councils can use the same approach as follows:
Making the £21.8m Go Further
The fund is sized to help around 75 councils. The lower the cost of getting each site ready, the more sites each council’s grant covers.
That is the case your bid can make to Homes England. You are not asking for money to do the same work the old way i.e. hire bums on seats or pay expensive consultants. You are showing how you are using tech to make the whole proces way more efficient – getting more sites to a de-risked, design-feasible concept, using an approach MHCLG has already tested.
Architects and design teams still matter. Just bring them in once the site is de-risked and the site is proven through RenKap and Blocktype, so their design time will be spent on sites that are much more likely to go ahead.
Continuing the Conversation
RenKap is an approved supplier on the UK Government’s G-Cloud 15 Framework, so councils can procure us by Direct Award in days rather than months
We are already supporting councils with their CHSF bids. If you want to show Homes England how your council can bring forward a pipeline at scale using proven PropTech solutions, get in touch with Gonzalo Marquesini FRICS, Founder of RenKap.
Get Multiple Survey Quotes Instantly
RenKap connects you with vetted UK surveyors across all survey types.
Upload your site and receive multiple like-for-like quotes instantly. Completely free.