Security and governance

BoroughLets holds data about families in temporary accommodation. This page sets out how that data is protected and how the AI is constrained, so your information governance colleagues can start from facts.

At a glance

Hosting: Managed cloud services in the London region. Personal data stays inside the council's own boundary.
Access: Named accounts, created by an administrator. No self registration, and no public access to any data.
Authentication: Multi factor authentication is mandatory for every user, with a twelve character minimum password policy.
Authorisation: Role based access control, enforced in the interface and again in the back end.
Encryption: AES-256 at rest, TLS 1.2 or higher in transit, with managed key rotation.
Audit: An immutable audit trail of user actions, alongside platform logging.
Retention: Property listings expire automatically after 90 days.
Alignment: Controls map to NCSC Cyber Essentials themes, UK GDPR security obligations and ISO 27001 principles.

Access and identity

Access is restricted to named, administrator provisioned accounts. There is no self registration and no public access to any data. Every user authenticates with multi factor authentication and holds one of a small number of defined roles, so a compromised account reaches only what that user could reach.

How AI is used, and its limits

The platform is a decision support tool for trained caseworkers. It does not make automated decisions about people. AI assists with search and triage; the caseworker makes every consequential decision.

AI features are labelled as AI assisted in the interface.

A plain English search returns the filters it derived, so a caseworker can see and adjust how the request was read before the search runs.

Telephony includes a review and confirm gate. An AI generated call summary must be reviewed and confirmed by the caseworker who made the call, cannot be altered once confirmed, and the original draft is preserved alongside the confirmed version.

AI is not used to score, rank or assess applicants. Bedroom need and affordability are rule based and explainable from published rates.

Audit and oversight

Every consequential action is recorded: who did it, to which record, and when. Managers can review confirmed calls and their summaries in one place. Imports are previewed, validated and confirmed before anything is written, and can be rolled back.

Data protection

The council is the data controller and BoroughLets is the processor. We support your data protection impact assessment, provide an information sharing agreement, and hold a documented record of processing. Requests from data subjects are answered by the council as controller, supported by per record storage and the audit trail.

Business continuity

The platform runs on managed, multiple availability zone cloud services. Data is backed up continuously with point in time recovery. Releases are delivered from a single trunk, pinned to a reviewed commit, and promoted through test and staging environments before production, so every deployment is traceable to a reviewed change.

Asking us for more

We hold a security overview, a safety, ethics and governance framework, a data protection impact assessment pack, an information sharing agreement template, and a resident facing privacy notice. Ask and we will send whichever of those you need.