Modernising the housing infrastructure fund

We developed a new digital and data strategy that resulted in an MVP being delivered along GDS lines in a matter of weeks.

The project

The Housing Infrastructure Fund is a capital grant programme that local authorities apply to in order to help deliver new homes across England. The investments they make need to be monitored and reported on but the process for doing so was highly manual and based on spreadsheets that had become so big they were slow and difficult to update.

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Our approach

In collaboration with our partner FutureGov we set about reforming the digital, data and platform architecture strategy for the Housing Infrastructure Fund. As a result, we recommended a new cloud-based architecture and agile ways of working that would enable the rapid development of MVP services.

The first two MVP services we built in line with GDS best practice were Asset Register, to register the investments made, and Monitor, to monitor the investments. These were developed as cloud-based applications built in Ruby on Rails and using AWS in conjunction with Terraform and containerisation to automate infrastructure.

“The programme is helping to deliver up to 300,000 new homes across England by providing local authorities with grant funding for new infrastructure.”

From “New Eastern Villages receives major boost thanks to Government funding for new link road” on the Swindon Borough Council Blog

The results

We built the MVPs in just 8 weeks and put the service live in 12 weeks. In addition, we built an API that made the application open and accessible to other services and developed a plan for its future evolution. We helped to transform the Housing Infrastructure Fund into a service that was built along GDS lines, with interoperability and modern security practices in place.

Housing infrastructure fund laptop

“We are committed to working with ambitious local authority partners seeking to meet their local housing needs through delivery of key infrastructure.”

From “Medway’s multi-million pound infrastructure project confirmed” on the Medway Council Blog

The results

  • MVP delivered in just 8 weeks
  • Service put live in only 12 weeks
  • Aligned with GDS best practices
  • Digital, data and platform strategy
  • API built for interoperability
  • Ruby on RailsAWS and Terraform

Want to know more? Get in touch!

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