Housing Corporation signs with ASP

The UK government's Housing Corporation is spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on a new application service provision system which will streamline its grant application system for hundreds of housing associations.

The Housing Corporation said last year that it would put the application system online to avoid receiving around 8000 forms which had to be keyed into a back-end storage system.

This year, the organisation chose application service provider FutureLink Europe to host the process, which involved doling out £1bn as part of the government's housing programme.

The scheme involved 2400 users at 550 housing associations accessing an online forms system via a standard internet browser. The Housing Corporation, keen to do its bit in Whitehall's drive to take government organisations online, insisted that all bids had to be made this way.

FutureLink provided a helpdesk for applicants and the secure servers in the UK to store the information, before it was passed onto the Housing Corporation on computer tape - a slight chink in the digital chain.

Neil Hadden, Housing Corporation director of investment, said: "We wanted to improve services by cutting down bureaucracy and paperwork, and complete the first step in making all our business systems accessible via the internet."

David Mills, FutureLink's vice president of commercial operations, said it developed the system last April and had it ready for the first bids in September, which ran up to last month.

"It must have been successful, because we received applications worth £2.2bn through the system," said Mills.

The Housing Corporation has signed a renewable contract on a year-to-year basis, said Mills, avoiding the corporation being tied to anything over a long period - something which has plagued other government departments in past years, when things have gone wrong with IT contracts.

"This shows that application service provision isn't just about renting software, we came up with a good cost-efficient solution for the Housing Corporation," said Mills.