Why BoroughLets exists: temporary accommodation, from a council desk

The search ran site by site. Affordability was worked out by hand. Agents were chased by phone, and much of what was said never reached the record. Every week that took was another week a family spent in temporary accommodation.

BoroughLets does that work in one place: the search at Local Housing Allowance, the household's affordability, the contact with the family, and the placement through to the day they move in.

How it is built

Alongside caseworkers, with the governance written before a feature ships rather than after it. The data protection impact assessment and the information sharing agreement for the first pilot were written before any live data was loaded, not retrofitted once the software worked. It begins a three month pilot with a London borough in October 2026.

Every change reaches the live service the same way: one branch, a pull request another person reviews, testing in our own environments first, and a named approver before it is released into a council's environments. Every deployment is recorded against its commit. That matters more for a small supplier than a large one, because it is the part of the answer to "how do we know what is running" that does not depend on trusting anyone.

The university partner

BoroughLets was built inside a research collaboration with a university, and the relationship is easy to describe loosely, so here it is plainly. Under the information sharing agreement for the pilot the university is a party to the processing rather than an observer of it, and one named individual there holds access to the live environment. Their role is platform administration, support and continuity, not casework. The security page sets out what that access is, and if you would rather it did not exist, that is a term of the agreement to raise before signing rather than a property of the software.

How big we are, and what happens if we stop

Small enough that you will deal with the person who builds the thing, which is the reason support has no ticket triage tier and the reason a bug reported on Tuesday is often fixed on Tuesday. It is also a risk, and pretending otherwise would be the wrong way to start.

So, plainly: the platform runs in your own cloud account, the data in it is yours and stays there whatever happens to us, and the exit terms are written down rather than promised. If continuity is a scoring line in your process, ask us about it directly and we will answer in writing rather than by assurance. BoroughLets is not yet incorporated as a company, and we will say so in any procurement conversation rather than let it surface later.

Where it works today

The search covers all 33 London boroughs. If you are a council outside London, talk to us about what coverage would mean for your area before you plan around it.

What BoroughLets is not

It is not a housing management system and does not try to become one. It does not do statutory returns, it does not hold your rent accounts, and it does not replace the system your allocations team already lives in. It sits beside them and does one job: getting a family from a homelessness duty into a private rented home they can afford, and recording what happened along the way.

It also does not decide anything about anybody. The AI drafts and searches; a caseworker decides. Bedroom need and affordability are worked out from published rates by rules you can read, not by a model.