Housing Officer - Migration - Ukraine Settlement Scheme

Your new company

Due to the partnership between Hays and Birmingham City Council, we are looking to recruit an experienced Housing Officer to join the Ukraine Settlement Scheme team. Being the largest leading local authority in the whole of Europe, Birmingham City Council are renowned for their expertise in public services and endless opportunities. Birmingham City Council provides the city’s residents with a number of services to ensure stability within citizens' daily lives.

Your new role

We are looking for two Housing Officers - Migration - on a full-time basis to provide a comprehensive, high quality Housing Advice Service for Ukrainian refugees across Birmingham and Solihull to ensure our cohort of clients are aware of the housing options available to them, based on their personal circumstances.

This work includes signposting to the various housing routes available, and advising on housing related benefits, rights and entitlement. While also assisting with moving on from the existing Host Scheme, predominantly to accommodation within the private Rented Sector making the best use of Grant Funding available for this purpose.
All of this is undertaken, seeking to improve housing and integration outcomes with a view to increase refugees’ self-sufficiency within Birmingham and Solihull. Our ideal candidate will have experience of working with refugees and/or vulnerable adults, and or have significant housing/homeless experience.

What you'll need to succeed

You will ideally need to have an understanding of the housing sector in Birmingham and Solihull.

You will have a working knowledge of the routes into housing, and the welfare benefits system, alongside a broad understanding of tenancy agreements, and tenancy rights in general, together with an understanding of the support sectors and housing options processes. You will be expected to attend and develop various group workshops to assist in the education of housing options for Ukrainian refugees.

This post requires you to have excellent organisation skills and the ability to show customer outcomes. In addition, you will need to have excellent written and verbal communication skills together with the ability to manage and prioritise your workload accordingly.

In particular, you will need up-to-date knowledge of welfare, housing, and tenancy rights/processes. Effective interpersonal skills, the ability to work with customers with a range of different needs,
Experience of managing complex and difficult situations in relation to vulnerable groups, including host/landlord mediation.

Have the ability to effectively liaise with a range of service providers and or agencies to establish or improve services for customers, an understanding of delivering high quality customer-focused customer-led services, together with the ability to be flexible with your working hours to meet the needs of customers where appropriate.

To be able to conduct host visits, and to inspect potential properties for let to the Ukrainian group of clients.

Be willing to undertake additional training if required. This could include HHSRS Training to assist in the identification of suitable private sector accommodation of the required standard.
These roles will be an ASAP start once compliant. Before starting, you will need to pass your reference and compliance checks. On registration please have your 2 most recent employment details available for reference checks.

What you'll get in return

These roles are full-time, temporary roles based in Birmingham. Initially, a contract running until March, whilst they await extensions for 2025/2026. This position offers a pay rate of £14 per hour + holiday allowance.

What you need to do now

If you're interested in this role, click 'apply now' to forward an up-to-date copy of your CV, or call us now.

If this job isn't quite right for you, but you are looking for a new position, please contact us for a confidential discussion about your career.