Homes England

System to record and report all aspects of the many varied types of projects managed by Homes England, including expenditure, income, outputs, milestones and risks.  A system used by over 700 users, throughout the country, and more recently also by the Greater London Authority.

For over 16 years we have been developing and supporting this system, after having taken over from a previous supplier who developed the initial system.  This has included several major technical upgrades, as well as significant redevelopment of the system to adapt it to meet the Agency’s requirements for its ever-changing roles and responsibilities.  The contract has grown from a small 4-day a month support contract for a single system to one that is developing and supporting a suite of systems, regularly generating a turnover of between £1m-£1.5m.  This work is based at the customer’s site, with STCS leading a team including a mixture of STCS staff, contractors and the customers own staff.  Sharing business knowledge and technical expertise throughout the team, managing the workload and regular reporting to the customer.

Design, development and support of a Finance system to record over £6.5bn of investments made by Homes England to third parties under various government funding programmes.  Recording key information for each investment and integrating with Homes England’s other systems, to perform numerous complex calculations for the entire lifetime of each investment, allowing for many varied contractual rules, and producing both accounting and legal views of the information.

The system is primarily used by the Portfolio Management and Finance teams to calculate interest, maintain investment balance data, make accounting adjustments, and produce statements.   In many regards it can be likened to a system for managing bank accounts.

Design and development of a .NET framework providing a platform for delivery of new systems for Homes England’s partners.  Following STCS’s delivery of Homes England’s first successful .NET product, succeeding where other suppliers had failed, the framework was then made available for new Homes England-only internal systems.

Design and development of a system to allow Homes England’s partners to submit regular updates about progress of their development schemes, including details about costs, income, outputs, risks, and milestones.   This information is then vetted and used to feed into other systems such as PCS and IRS.

After initially processing Excel spreadsheets containing Expressions of Interest from partners for government funding, Homes England agreed with STCS’s assessment of the risks involved in managing over £6.5bn funding via spreadsheets.  This project entailed the design and development of a web-based system for submitting enquiries and applications for funding, along with supporting documentation via attachments, configured to support multiple high-profile programmes of funding and other support.

Design and Development of a system to track and value over £9.75bn in recoverable investments in approximately 100,000 small home equity loans. The cash flow and profit and loss for these assets, as they are disposed of, or equity percentage changes due to staircasing (where the home owner buys back a portion of the Homes England equity), also has to be accounted for, potentially for many years into the future.

This involves complex calculations for assessing the fair value with adjustments set based upon the area, type of property, developer, when it was purchased, how much deposit paid, loan to value, etc.

Design and Development of a system to generate and manage ‘Papers’ submitted to Meetings of project boards and other committees, for decisions regarding approval of proposals.

Design and Development of a system to record potential projects for disposal of Public Sector Land, and to assess these based upon costs and benefits.     Integration with other systems such as Homes England’s Land Management Tools (a spatial data and mapping system) and PCS.

Providing SQL Server Reporting Services training to Homes England Working Service Desk to allow them to deliver reports for the Service Desk using SQL Server.  Development of reports and providing guidance with delivery of other reports.

System to collate data from several systems to provide Programme and Directorate level information for monthly analysis and reporting and for budget management.

STCS have been developing and supporting this system for over 8 years.

Collating data from Homes England’s many systems to allow cross agency, integrated reporting and to provide consistency between systems.

Provision of Business Objects reporting facilities for many of Homes England’s systems to allow cross agency, integrated reporting.