Homelessness Prevention Team Leader

Reading Borough Council - Homelessness Prevention Team Leader

Are you a Homelessness Prevention Team Leader looking for your next assignment? Reading Borough Council are looking for a Homelessness Prevention Team Leader to join their team on a contract basis initially. Please see below details:

1. To manage a Homeless Prevention Team specialising in providing advice and assistance to families approaching with housing issues, including the development of standards and good practice required to deliver an effective and quality service to the community.
2. 2. To support the Homeless Prevention Team Leader, as and when required, who will be responsible for delivering services for single applicants and couples.
3. 3. To lead a team of officers to effectively provide private sector tenancy advice and put in place mechanisms to prevent or relieve homelessness, and assess homeless applications.
4. 4. To be responsible for the day to day supervision of the Homeless Prevention Families Team whilst maintaining high standards of casework and maintaining own caseload.
5. 5. To ensure that Personalised Housing Plans are implemented for all applicants approaching the services, are reviewed and followed through in order to increase prevention and relief.
6. 6. To provide advice and guidance to the team on more complex issues.
7. 7. To focus the team's work on prevention of homelessness and ensure that the advice provided by the team is up to date, accurate and applied appropriately.
8. 8. To provide training and information sessions to other agencies.
10. To be responsible for ensuring Homeless Prevention Officers are delivering the statutory prevention and relief duties under Homelessness Reduction Act 2017.
11. 2. To be jointly responsible for the running of the Homeless Prevention Service, ensuring adequate staffing levels are maintained at all times.
12. 3. To co-ordinate the induction, training and development of staff, ensuring staff are able to achieve to the best of their ability in delivering an excellent service.
13. 4. To provide detailed guidance and support to Homeless Prevention Officers regarding a range of complex issues, including, security of tenure, welfare rights, property disrepair, landlord harassment, illegal eviction, mediation, financial capability and homelessness, whilst providing specific advice in complex cases.
14. 5. To support the team to deliver tailored housing solutions for families, liaising with relevant agencies, such as Childrens Services to ensure that all aspects of the household are considered, such as education, health, employment, etc. and prevention and relief of homelessness is achieved.
15. 6. To support the team to develop a toolkit of prevention and relief options for families and ensure that this is up to date and relevant.
16. 7. To provide service standards for case work to monitor performance and enable specific criteria to be met to enable retention of benchmarks, e.g. Community Legal Services Quality Mark.
17. 8. To supervise the assessment of housing needs cases, the development of options to meet the needs of the families approaching and the implementation of those options by the Homeless Prevention Team.
18. 9. To lead, motivate and empower staff to make customer focused outcomes to resolve housing issues.
19. 10.To deal with employee relations issues, including, managing induction, probation, capability and disciplinary issues.
20. 11.To monitor service outputs and policies and ensure the team follows procedures, e.g. home visits are carried out by the team to prevent homelessness.
21. 12.To monitor performance against set targets and identify solutions for weak areas of the service and lead on developing action plans to resolve operational issues. To ensure performance management systems are adopted and fully implemented by the team.
22. 13.To have statutory responsibility for the investigation and assessment of applications and referrals under Homeless Reduction Act 2017. To approve recommendations and decisions made by officers in relation to complex applications in line with current legislation and relevant caselaw.
23. 14.To carry out reviews under s.202 of the legislation, maintaining quality control of reviews, ensuring that they are carried out in a timely and efficient manner.

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