Associations relieved as corporation revamps ‘creaking’ grant software

The move – which will be widely welcomed by housing association development staff – will also incorporate changes required as part of the corporation’s pilot scheme to pay social housing grant to private developers.

Neil Hadden, the corporation’s deputy chief executive, said: “We will have rewritten the Investment Management Service for future bid rounds. It is creaking at the seams and we need to make it more user-friendly.

“We need to modernise IMS to get rid of some of the unnecessary elements. The aim is to have it up and running in time for the next allocation programme in autumn 2005.”

Hadden declined to detail what aspects of the programme would be rewritten.

Howard Hughes, group development director at Circle 33, welcomed the change. “Using IMS is laborious, time-consuming and it is technically inflexible. We have the equivalent of one member of staff permanently filling out and updating all the online forms required.”

The move emerged as housebuilders threatened not to bid for the £200m grant pilot if they were made to bid through IMS.

Terry Fuller, chair of the affordable housing committee at the House Builders’ Federation, said: “If the corporation expects us to use this system to submit bids, it is going to put us off. It has nothing to do with delivering affordable housing more efficiently.”

In response, Hadden said that, for the proposed pilot, bidders would not have to bid using IMS. However, he added that if the pilot were rolled out across the corporation’s annual £1.67bn investment programme, bids would have to be made through the updated IMS.

“How do they expect us to pay them the cash if not through IMS?”

It also emerged this week that the consultation paper on paying social housing grant to non-registered social landlords – revealed in last week’s Housing Today – will not now be published until next week. This will result in the proposed consultation period running into the second week of January.