Housing Options Officer, Essex

If you have vast previous experience in Housing Options/Needs, providing advice and solutions for the homeless then here is the job for you. You will be providing customers with housing advice with a strong focus on homelessness prevention; seeing customers through all stages of the process including personalised housing plans and a decision on their homeless application if prevention or relief has not been possible. A busy local authority based in Essex are currently looking for a highly experienced Housing Options Officer to undertake the following duties: To participate actively as a member of the Housing Options Team to: (a) Provide comprehensive housing advice to the public to prevent homelessness where possible, enable customers to make informed decisions based on an understanding of the options available to them and to maximise the use of good quality housing across all tenures. (b) Implement all aspects of the Council's statutory homelessness duties including processing homeless applications made under Part VII of the Housing Act 1996, Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 and discharging any subsequent duties. (c) Processing first stage, simple s202 review requests for statutory decisions made at assessment stage by assessment officers (d) Provide coaching and mentoring to assessment officers (e) provide a first stage assessment perspective as a housing options officer in terms of duties owed and where the Council's s188 duty may be owed, in particular in response to emergency approaches