Interim Disability Benefits Officer – Benefits and Housing Needs

Reference no: Hackney RQ781574

Pay rate: £20.06 per hour PAYE

Requirement to work outside normal working hours including weekends on occasions

Working within The Money Hub, the Disability Benefits Officer will assist with new and bold ways to streamline and simplify the way that residents can get assistance with their finances, with a huge emphasis on using data to reach out to residents known to be struggling to help them to maximise their incomes.

To help residents to get support for their disability needs, both financial and non-financial, to help meet their short and long term needs. Each case will be slightly different and will need to consider the individual circumstances of a resident that is requesting support in order to decide how best to help them. To also support three Outreach Workers with developing their skills and understanding of support available for people with disabilities, long-term illness, or caring responsibilities, providing training and encouraging their professional development.

Key responsibilities:

• Identify residents who need financial assistance due to a disability, caring responsibilities, long-term illness and/or being unable to work due to physical or mental health barriers, and have responsibility for supporting them with long-term benefits uptake.
• Be proactive in providing support for residents to prevent them from reaching financial crisis.
• Learn and use digital tools, including the LIFT dashboard, to identify and engage with residents at risk of financial hardship due to disability, long-term illness, physical or mental health conditions, and caring responsibilities.
• Deal with all day-to-day correspondence and telephone calls in line with service standards. To provide written responses to enquiries for councillors, senior managers, and MPs and ensure that responses are provided within agreed timescales.
• Provide ongoing monitoring information for performance scrutiny to the Team Manager.
• Actively participate in the reviewing of Income Maximisation policies and procedures.
• Record data accurately and contribute to the development, maintenance and monitoring of systems, registers, records and databases for the efficient storage and retrieval of data, whilst undertaking analysis and research to produce reports as required on all neighbourhood management issues.
• Provide in person support for residents, either through home visits or at community events, when this is appropriate and the best way to engage with a resident. This will be approximately every 2 weeks.

“Role Requirements” – to give yourself the maximum chance of success please try and ensure your CV addresses the following essential criteria:

Experience & Knowledge:

• Minimum of 12 months recent experience in a similar role, or context and ideally within a public sector organisation.
• Detailed working knowledge of law, practice, council policy and guidance relating to Personal Independence Payments, Disability Living Allowance, Severe Disability Premium, Carers Allowance, Attendance Allowance and other disability benefits for carers. Have experience with completing these forms on behalf of clients.
• Detailed working knowledge of law, practice, council policy and guidance relating to other financial support, such as Housing Benefit, Council Tax Benefit and Council Tax Reduction, housing, Welfare Reform, tenancy, lettings, benefits advice, debt and money management, income maximisation, Security of Tenure,  Discretionary schemes DHP, HDCSS and CTRHDS and East London sub-region and Pan London region.
• Experience of customer service in dealing with people on the telephone and in person.
• Experience of effective partnership working with agencies and stakeholders and the proven ability in engaging, negotiating and consulting with a wide range of audiences.
• Experience of working flexibly to meet the needs of the service and its customers.
• Experience of assisting vulnerable and challenging customers.

Skills:

• Ability to manage own workload and manage conflicting priorities in a pressurised working environment that are subject to frequently changing circumstances in order to achieve targets within challenging timescales.
• Good organisational skills and the ability to prioritise workload to deliver to tight deadlines, targets and performance standards.
• Excellent verbal and written communication and presentation skills and the ability to communicate effectively with a range of audiences including partner services and agencies and the ability to explain complex processes in simple language.
• Ability to exercise good judgement.
• Comfortable with change, welcoming it as an opportunity to grow and ability to look positively for solutions rather than obstacles.
• Ability to travel around the borough in order to attend community events.
• Ability to mediate and negotiate effectively.
• Ability to analyse and understand complex information.
• Be available to work outside normal working hours including at weekends if required.
• Strong IT skills using Microsoft packages or equivalent (e.g. G Suite).

NB: Please feel free to apply to us direct via [email protected] by quoting the job reference and job title exactly. SEE DETAILS AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS AD.

If you have previously applied to one of our vacancies and have already sent the required supporting documentation to us, please make this clear when you re-apply as this will help speed up your application.

To help speed up the process of uploading your CV to the client we would suggest that you send us your CV in Word format (or equivalent) if possible, rather than as a PDF.

If you are successful in securing this role, please note that for the entire duration of this contract, regardless of extension you will be working this role at the PAYE rate that has been advertised. For absolute clarity, we only work on a PAYE basis, rather than entertaining umbrella pay terms, we do not offer Ltd/umbrella or outside IR35 rates. If you wish to understand PAYE vs Umbrella more, please let us know and we can send you some additional information for clarity.