Sector UK

Background

Seven of the local authorities in the Cambridgeshire region along with the registered social landlords they work with formed an agreement to implement a single choice based lettings scheme within their regions. Some of the major benefits of using one system are that it would give them economies of scale, allow the scheme to offer mobility between areas and allow each one of them to benefit from the working practices of others.

Main Barriers

The housing demand and needs in the different local authorities within the scheme are very different. The scheme includes city authorities such as Cambridge City Council which covers a smaller geographical area but caters to a large number of densely populated people. In contracts there are district authorities such as Huntingdonshire District Council which covers a large, rural, less populated area and needs to meet other housing criteria such as the importance of local connection to villages. As such the local authorities’ assess applicants housing need based on different criteria and the joint solution needed to be able to accommodate this. The local authorities each currently hold the records of their applicants and properties in an internal housing management system and each organisation within the scheme has a different system. Not all of the authorities with the scheme were capable of going Live with choice based lettings at the same time. The implementation plan needed the flexibility to be able to accommodate this. One local authority, Forest Heath, realised that the license to their housing management system was going to end before they could implement choice based lettings, and renewing the licence would incur significant cost. The extra cost could jeopardise their participation in the scheme.

Solution

The Cambridgeshire scheme chose to use Sector and LHS's choice software to implement their solution. The implementation required a dataload out of each of the organisations housing management systems. Sector detailed the structure of the required extracted data and detailed the process each of the IT departments needed to follow to get their data to Sector in a secure electronic format. Sector met with each of the organisations IT department to consult on these processes and in some cases coded the extract process for the IT department. The next step of the implementation was to configure the software to prioritise the shortlists differently for each of the organisations within the scheme. This was so that each organisation had complete control over how their shortlists were filtered and ordered and insured that the software implemented exactly their local housing policy. Project managers worked with each of the organisations and defined the housing priority and eligibility within each organisation. The system was then configured to implement this. Faced with Forest Heath’s licensing dilemma, Sector reconfigured a version of the choice system to offer an allocations system that used the traditional lettings process. The solution was designed and implemented during a two week window and ran successfully until Choice Based Lettings went live. That Sector and LHS's system was capable of such a radical, rapid customisation is an extreme example of it’s adaptability.

Due to Fenland District Council implementing a new housing management system at the same time as the other partners were going live with the CBL they chose to hold off on going live with CBL until their housing management system implementation was complete. The system accommodated this and can “switch on” partners as and when their internal process are ready for CBL. Although each organisation in the scheme had different housing policies it was recognised that there were a number of aspects to CBL that were in common. The scheme came up with a common brand Home-Link brand. The public web site and advert design was common across all partners and a common application form was designed. The design process was coordinated and a public web site was built for the scheme. A freesheet was designed for the scheme and the system software was configured to produce this PDF automatically from the database. A single online form was built for the scheme. Follow this link to view the Home-link public web site.

Conclusion

There were a number of stumbling blocks that could have stood in the way of the Cambridgeshire scheme going ahead with CBL. However the power and flexibility of our system and our ability to come up with fresh ideas and fresh solutions overcame or accommodated for all of these possible problems.