Challenge
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) wanted to develop a new digital service to replace the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) register for rating the performance of buildings, as it was being run by an outsourced supplier. The existing service was inflexible and had become too expensive to maintain, so they wanted a cloud-based service that could be run in-house along modern government standards.
Our approach
We began with a three week inception phase to understand user personas, turn ideas into lo-fi designs and establish agile delivery ceremonies and ways of working. This was important as the civil service team needed to understand what reporting, governance and compliance processes were needed to run the new service along GDS guidelines.
Data needed to be clearly designed and accessible through APIs. These were built to integrate with six accredited schemes, with all services exposed through a documented REST API. Existing data was migrated slice by slice from the legacy system, so it could be used as required by the new service. This was achieved using AWS Snowball.
This is the first time MHCLG has taken the running of a digital service back in-house and redeveloped it from the ground up, following the user-needs driven principles of the Digital Service Standard. This makes it a significant step in our department’s digital transformation journey.
From “Rebuilding the Energy Performance of Buildings Registers” on the MHCLG Digital Blog
Results we achieved together
The new gov.uk service that will let users check the EPC for their home has been built using Ruby, Gov PaaS and PostgreSQL. It includes an adapter service that reads documents from both the old and new data stores. Data is also pushed to policy makers, academics and open communities involved in carbon cutting. The civil service team has been upskilled to build citizen facing services, with API governance frameworks and standards developed.
- Agile delivery of new gov.uk service
- Ruby, Gov PaaS and PostgreSQL used
- Data migration using AWS Snowball
- APIs to integrate with six accredited schemes
- Adapter to read from old and new data store
- Team upskilled to work along GDS guidelines
This new service will help us improve the production process for EPC data and help other people relate it to the planning, housing and other data digital land is making available.
Paul Downey
Head of Digital Land at the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government
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