Housing Options IT System

City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council (the Council) is seeking to appoint a suitably experienced and qualified Provider (the Provider) to deliver a Housing Options IT System (the System). The proposed contract will be for an initial duration of five (5) years with a possible two (2) x twelve (12) months extensions. The Council's Housing Options Service delivers statutory functions pertinent to advising customers in housing need, assisting to find suitable long-term accommodation, accessing housing related support, undertaking Homeless assessments and discharging the main duty in the Social Housing and Private Rented Sector. The Council is not a stock-holding Authority and it discharges its duties via nominations to Registered Providers (RP). During 2016/17, over 20,000 customers registered on the Council's Housing Allocations System. In the same period, the Housing Options Service assessed over 8000 customers who were in housing need and over 30% were placed in supported and temporary accommodation via the Housing Related Support gateway system. The Council's Housing Options Service currently uses 3 separate IT systems to deliver these functions and the Council is seeking to replace these with one fully integrated IT solution. The System is intended to be accessed by (but not limited to): • Over 70 Housing Options members of staff • Circa 20 Registered Providers (over 2000 voids per annum) that operate in the District • 5 Housing Related Support (HRS) and Temporary Accommodation Providers • Over 20,000 registrations for Housing per annum • Over 500 registrations for HRS per annum. • Customer Services staff The Council operated Choice Based Lettings for a number of years, it then moved to an automated matching system which is the current methodology. The Council seeks to overcome the disadvantages of both these methods and provide better customer access and more self-service. For example, Housing is aiming to move towards a more personalised system that engages better with users and places them at the heart of the service. The Council's Microsoft Windows server infrastructure is 99% virtualised running on VMware 5.5 Hypervisor across a combination of IBM 3850 and 3550's X-series. There are 9 hosts at our primary site and 6 hosts at our continuity site. Each site is connected to its own SAN using IBM N-Series storage. Currently supported Windows operating systems on this infrastructure are Windows 2008 R, 2012 and 2016. There are plans to upgrade the VMware hypervisor to version 6.1 in the 4th quarter of 2017 and an upgrade of the storage infrastructure 1st and 2nd quarter of 2018.

The Council also have an IBM AIX infrastructure running on P7 and P8's at both sites. These are connected to the same SAN infrastructure and are running virtualised.