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Job Description
Temporary Homeless Officer – Homeless Team
Reference no: Wakefield 0008 F56A / 1
Pay Rate: £15.43 per hour PAYE
37 Monday - Friday, normal working hours
This opening assignment is for 9 months
City: WAKEFIELD
Basic DBS disclosure required
The team provides homeless prevention, assessment, and decision-making services to those who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless. The role involves undertaking casework to identify and address an applicant’s housing related problems and to provide reports to enable decisions to be made on what duty the Council owes to each household.
Someone with highly effective interpersonal skills, the ability to communicate effectively at all levels and have personal resilience when dealing with challenging situations. You will also need to be highly organised, able to work within strict deadlines, have good IT skills and able to work both within a team and independently.
Key Responsibilities
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- Work as part of a duty team to ensure that all homeless people and potentially homeless people have had their circumstances fully assessed.
- Explain to service users the process of making a homeless application, the reasons why detailed enquiries will be undertaken and possible outcomes and implications of such an assessment. To inform service users on how an outcome affects the way we can help them. This will involve managing difficult and challenging situations in a professional and safe way.
- Inform and explain to service users where appropriate to do so, any rights of occupancy that they have and how their decisions relating to occupying/giving up such accommodation may affect their current and future homeless applications.
- Interview homeless applicants and gather relevant information regarding their homelessness and to obtain permission from the applicant to make enquiries with third parties where it is necessary to do so.
- Make relevant third party enquiries and obtain information to help establish eligibility, homelessness, priority need, intentionality and local connection. This could involve a variety of enquiries to private individuals, landlords, lenders, statutory and voluntary organisations.
- Complete assessment forms accurately and legibly and update case notes to a standard which are capable of being be used in homeless decision making and potentially court challenge.
- Provide service users with a full appraisal of their situation and to encourage them to consider all options available to them to obtain new accommodation or prevent losing their existing accommodation.
- Prevent or delay homelessness by negotiating with existing and potential housing providers to allow the applicant to return to or move to accommodation.
- Manage a case load of homeless applications, ensuring that appropriate work is undertaken, recorded and passed to a manager for a case review or to undertake a decision within the timescales set.
- Set up cases on the in-house case management system and update the systems in an accurate and timely manner.