Base Location: Working from home and any CBC offices, including Watling House, Dunstable. You will be expected to attend a CBC office location on a monthly basis, and as needed to carry out your role

Are you effective at negotiating? Are you being good communicator and able to deal with people in stressful situations?

Can you find imaginative solutions for people who are affected by homelessness?

Could you persuade a landlord to change their mind about evicting their tenant?

Are you able understand housing and homeless law and decide what duties are owed to households threatened with homelessness?

If so, we’d love to hear from you.

Our Housing Solutions Service are looking for 6x Trainee Homeless Intervention Officers to join our award-nominated and innovative Homelessness Intervention Team as full-time members of staff to provide an innovative and person-centred service aimed at alleviating and preventing homelessness.

Working in either our Specialist Early Intervention & Prevention or Crisis Intervention & Relief Teams you will be responsible for providing comprehensive housing advice and assessment of households who are homeless or threatened with homelessness.

You will prioritise the prevention of homelessness through early intervention, assisting customers to improve their situation so they that can remain in stable accommodation or provide effective crisis intervention when accommodation is already lost and will do this through negotiating with landlords and relatives whilst working jointly with other services ensuring providing a person-centred approach.

You will help couples and single people avoid living on the streets and provide crisis intervention to customers who have already lost their accommodation or are unable to remain in their existing accommodation due to domestic abuse.

You will need to make use of all available housing resources to advise customers of all their housing options as well as their legal rights to intervene in homelessness and support them to remain in or find suitable accommodation. You will also make complex statutory homeless decisions to discharge the council’s homeless duties having regard to a legal framework and case law.

To be successful in this role, you will need to be resilient and able to deal with emotionally challenging cases in difficult situations. You will be capable of making a high and demanding caseload of customers with varying support needs with minimal supervision and able to negotiate with others and find solutions to complicated situations.

The environment is high pressured and faced paced so you will need good organisational skills to effectively manage your caseload. Experience of working with several IT systems and ability to learn new systems to a high standard is a must.

You will be required to work across the Central Bedfordshire area and have access to a vehicle to occasionally drive to various locations to undertake home visits or attend multi-agency meetings or training.   As part of the role you will be required participate in the provision of an enhanced Out of Hours service on a rota.

The  Council have ‘One Team’ approach to working and this relies on each and every person working collaboratively to deliver shared goals. To be a positive influence on this environment, you’ll need to be able to support others and be a genuine team player.

What the council is really looking for is someone with a true customer focus, an understanding of what great customer service involves and a commitment to delivering outstanding results ensuring excellent communication and interpersonal skills along the way.

Organisationally there is a strong teaching hospital approach to grow and develop all staff. The roles available are career progression roles so there is the opportunity for you to develop and progress your housing career within the team using a mix of on-the-job learning and training offers, with the potential to be supported to earn a housing qualification.

What we can offer you:

As well as joining a welcoming, committed, and hardworking team you will have access to numerous benefits, including:

Hybrid working arrangements as appropriate. We recognise the importance of supporting our employees to balance their home and work life and to be able to work in the most efficient way. As a hybrid worker you will be able to work from home with access to any CBC location.

A £250 one off hybrid worker payment, helping you achieve a safe and suitable work space at home

Support to work from abroad for up to a month a year where appropriate

Generous family friendly policies and practices

A supportive and inclusive environment that values and celebrates differences

Staff network and support groups

Annual leave allowance 24 days + statutory holidays rising to 31 days with length of service.

Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS). This is a valuable part of our rewards package for employees and includes Life Assurance: click here

An Employee Assistance Programme offering support to all employees through workplace changes as well as other work, family and personal issues

Training and Learning offer – we have access to hundreds of courses and role specific training is also available

Access to discounts from local and national retailers

Central Bedfordshire Council has its own vision and values that are integral to everything we do. Our area vision is to make Central Bedfordshire 'A great place to live and work

Our Aspiration is to be a truly flexible employer.  We are happy to discuss location, hours and working pattern as part of the application process.

To assess your suitability for the role, you must demonstrate how you meet the key outcomes, accountabilities and competencies. To do this, you’ll need to refer the Family Profile, Role Profile and Competency Framework which can be found in the Recruitment Pack: Trainee Homeless Intervention Officer Recruitment Pack.

For an informal discussion about this position, please contact: Mai Brown at Mai.Brown@centralbedfordshire.gov.uk or 0300 300 6697

For queries related to the recruitment of this vacancy, please contact: The Recruitment team at recruitment@centralbedfordshire.gov.uk  

Central Bedfordshire Council is an equal opportunities employer. We are committed to improving the diversity of our workforce to better reflect the communities we serve.  Therefore we welcome applications from everyone. In addition we are a  Disability Confident employer, we are working to become a Disability Confident leader in our community.

To maintain a fair and consistent approach for applicants, it is Central Bedfordshire Council's policy to only consider applications made via our online application system and we therefore thank you for not submitting your application offline.

If you require assistance to apply for our roles, help with writing your CV, interview techniques or careers advice please contact our team of careers advisors at ncs@centralbedfordshire.gov.uk Our service is confidential, impartial and free for all.