Strategic Housing Specialist Fosse Way (Ref: 21700)

Please refer to Job Description

Overview of the job

This is a permanent, non-operational role with no prisoner case-level responsibilities.

The role will sit within Prison Group Director (PGD) management structures, however, a heavy focus on and presence in establishments will be required (usually within a cluster of prisons depending on complexity and demand at each establishment and local housing landscape) with the expectation that post holders will travel as and when required. Due to the pan region focus of some roles this may include travel to prisons releasing into the area.

There are no line management responsibilities as part of this role, and we do not expect the post holder to have operational experience, although this may be advantageous when working within the establishment.

Summary

The post holder could be responsible for several prisons, splitting their time flexibly between the prisons in their portfolio. Prisons that release low numbers to the UK will fall under the ‘consultancy’ category; for these, post holders will be expected to offer ad-hoc housing advice, but these prisons will not form part of their cluster.

The post holder will identify areas for improvement with respect to access to accommodation for prison leavers and will work in partnership with key strategic housing stakeholders, probation commissioned rehabilitative services (CRS), and Homelessness Prevention Teams (HPTs) to implement sustainable change. You will ensure that work between each prison and relevant HPTs continues to integrate, and that senior leaders across the agency are supported to improve the quality and use of data.

In order to offer informed support and guidance to Governors and their teams, the Strategic Housing Specialist will be required to understand, amongst other aspects, the security category of their base prison and the geographical locations to which prisoners will be released. Prison familiarisation training will be provided to ensure successful candidates have the fundamental knowledge they need to be effective in their roles.

For roles across the women's prison estate, post holders should adopt a trauma-informed and gender specific approach to their role. Post holders should ensure that all activities reflect and embrace the diverse nature of prison populations, including the individual resettlement needs of the female prison population.

Responsibilities, Activities and Duties

The job holder will be required to carry out the following responsibilities, activities and duties:

• The Strategic Housing Specialist will be responsible for co-ordinating the strategic response of a cluster of prisons to improve housing outcomes for prison leavers and people in prison. They shall strengthen and support partnership working between the prison, all relevant housing stakeholders and other key resettlement agencies. They will identify existing structures/partnership working to address homelessness from custody in the region, and work to develop new solutions to homelessness from custody.
• They will champion delivery of the Homelessness Reduction Act (HRA) and Duty to Refer (DtR), Offender Pathway (Wales) within the prison(s). This to include:
• Working with partners to ensure referrals under the DtR are as efficient and effective as possible.
• Design and deliver (or coordinate the delivery of) training related to homelessness within the prison and relevant statutory criminal justice agencies, so staff understand accommodation issues, increase their knowledge around the HRA and DtR, can identify related needs and have the knowledge to respond appropriately.
• Promote the HRA and DtR amongst prisoners to address unhelpful myths, set realistic housing expectations and encourage engagement with the commissioned rehabilitation service, prison housing stakeholders, and local authorities.
• Developing pre-release assessments with Local Authorities in response to DTRs, through telephone, video and in-person assessments.
• Promote the work of the Accommodation Commissioned Rehabilitative Services (CRS) within the prison and support these services by representing the prison on any joint engagement with external partners, such as local authorities or HPTs or local homelessness board. Contribute towards Accommodation CRS becoming successfully embedded into the prison and promote their work to the prison’s Senior Leadership Team. Help to find solutions to issues that arise in relation to practical challenges in service delivery and an understanding of the role of CRS with all relevant staff groups. This role will act as an enabler and will not manage, or duplicate efforts of, the Accommodation CRS.
• Working alongside Probation Regions delivering the Community Accommodation Service - Tier 3(CAS3) temporary accommodation provision:
• Ensure processes are in place to make sure the Duty to Refer has been discharged appropriately and that all other accommodation options have been fully explored before a CAS3 referral is made.
• Work with the Regional Probation team and their Homelessness Prevention Team to maximise use of the accommodation offer for those at risk of homelessness, so that they can access interim accommodation at the point of release.
• Support and upskill staff across the agency (including CPPs and POMs) to ensure accommodation needs are identified and addressed appropriately, to understand relevant referrals and troubleshoot any issues which may arise.
• Promote work within the prison to help prepare prison leavers to sustain accommodation in the community, in line with the Prime Minister’s accommodation target, such as developing and delivering training solutions on tenancy readiness or prisoner’s housing rights.
• Support prisons, PGDs, and relevant partner agencies (such as HPTs) to improve the quality and use of data where it relates to prisoners and housing outcomes, including the use for research and service design and provision.

The duties/responsibilities listed above describe the post as it is at present and is not intended to be exhaustive. The job holder is expected to accept reasonable alterations and additional tasks of a similar level that may be necessary. Significant adjustments may require re-examination under the Job Evaluation Scheme and shall be discussed in the first instance with the job holder.

Behaviours

• Changing and Improving
• Working Together
• Making Effective Decisions
• Seeing the Big Picture
• Communicating and Influencing

Experience

The Candidate is required to have some experience of supporting delivery of the Homelessness Reduction Act, such as:

• Worked within the field of housing and/or homelessness, particularly supporting those at risk of homelessness into accommodation within the region.
• Worked with prisoners or those engaged in the criminal justice system.
• Worked with key related agencies, including prisons, probation and local authorities.
• History of developing partnerships with internal and external stakeholders.
• Worked in a multi-agency operational setting to achieve mutual outcomes.

The Candidate is required to have some understanding of:

• The Justice System, including the roles and responsibilities of prisons and probation.
• Housing legislation, particularly the Homelessness Reduction Act and the Duty to Refer.
• Accommodation options for those leaving prison.
• Benefit system and Universal Credit.
• Resettlement pathways and potential related accommodation needs of prison leavers.

Factor & Examples

Please provide job-specific examples to support the factors below (please refer to guidance for completion):

Skills & Knowledge

The post holder will act as a subject matter expert on issues around housing and homelessness for those in prison and involved in the wider criminal justice system. They will be able to provide strategic advice to regional and prison senior leadership on how to remove the barriers to settled accommodation for prisoners on release and to increase the number of prisoners who are able to maintain their tenancy whilst in custody.

They will have an excellent working knowledge of homelessness and housing law, particularly where it involves prisoners. They will also have an excellent working knowledge of housing options for prisoners, including options for preventing the loss of tenancies and for finding new accommodation on release. They will be able to provide advice to other professionals on the subject.

They will have an understanding of prison induction and resettlement processes, and will be able to identify, advice on and implement improvements to these processes in order to improve housing outcomes for those in custody.

The post holder will be able to engage with and coordinate multiple housing stakeholders, both internal and external to HMPPS, in order to improve processes and pathways relating to housing outcomes for people in custody. This will include working in partnership with agencies such as local authority housing departments, over whom HMPPS may not hold any legislative influence or control.

Being an expert in the field of housing and homelessness will mean that the post holder will have the knowledge required to challenge other stakeholders. They will need the skills required to be able to make such challenges in a diplomatic but assertive way in order to hold other stakeholders to account and drive change.

The post holder will be able to support senior leaders at prison and regional levels to improve the quality of housing-related data that they collect and to use that data to improve performance and design better processes and services.

The post holder will be able to identify barriers to housing for those in prison, develop creative solutions, conduct needs analyses for proposed solutions, engage with stakeholders in order to secure their buy-in, and then develop those solutions into working products that achieve positive change.

Accountability & Decision Making

The post holder will be accountable for:

The post holder will be expected to provide advice and guidance to regional and prison senior leaders in order to strengthen the housing-related processes with their prison(s), developing continuous improvements to operating procedures, developing best practice. When improvements are made, they should be shared to support the development of the best practice across their region and nationally in order for processes to be updated across the prison estate.

They are also expected to be able to see the ‘bigger picture’, and support other government departments, local authorities, services, and policy makers in order to drive change.

The post holder will be accountable for supporting the development of regional and prison-specific housing strategies and wide reducing reoffending re-offending strategies. They will provide the advice on areas for improvement and support the planning and implementation of those improvements whether they be prison-specific or pan-region.

When strategic failure occurs, the post holder will be expected to report where faults are occurring and present workable solutions. These solutions may be used to improve systems within other prisons in the group, so the post holder will be expected to share innovations with the network of other Housing Specialists.

All accommodation services are being designed and delivered to achieve the Criminal Justice Task Force accommodation on release target of 90% (currently measured via the Performance Hub under the CU150 ‘housed on release’ figure).

The post holder will be accountable to:

The Housing Specialist will report to the Regional Head of Reoffending under their region’s Prison Group Director. They will also report to and provide support for the Head of Reducing Reoffending at each prison that they are allocated to (up to 3 prisons depending on demand).

The post holder will be responsible for writing reports for the region’s and prison’s Head of Reducing Reoffending, detailing performance and efficiency of new housing initiatives. When initiatives are not working, the post holder will be responsible for identifying where failures have occurred and highlighting solutions.

The post holder is responsible for ensuring that their work aligns with the priorities of Inspection bodies such as Her Majesties Inspectorate of Prisons and Ofsted. The post holder will be expected to keep records of all housing-related processes, changes and improvements in order to provide evidence of the prison’s housing strategy to the Inspectorate.

The post holder will be expected to make decisions based upon relevant and up to date information about housing, homelessness and criminal justice issues of national and local levels.

They will take part in relevant homelessness forums, initiating these where they do not already exist and facilitating or chairing where required. They will coordinate actions and learning from these forums, and feed information back to senior leadership.

Problem Solving

The post holder’s primary task will be to identify barriers to accommodation for prison leavers at their respective prison(s), including broader trends and individual situations, and provide advice to senior leaders, and internal and external stakeholders. In most cases the post holder should be able to identify workable solutions to problems without reference to senior managers, drawing upon their expert knowledge of housing issues. They will be expected to seek and implement solutions under the own initiative.

One of the first tasks for newly appointed post holders will be to carry out a full review of the housing landscape at their respective prison(s), including identifying strengths on which to build and weaknesses that need addressing. They will then be tasked with developing an action plan for each prison outlining a suite of workable solutions to each problem. They should then use that action plan to implement those solutions through effective project management.

The postholder will work to resolve a combination of straight forward and complex issues, which will require working with a range of different stakeholder groups to ensure solutions meet requirements of both stakeholders and prison leavers.

The post holder will need to work with and coordinate a range of partners to address the problems that they identify. This will require expert planning, the use of accurate and relevant data, and clear communication (both written and verbal) in order to coordinate an effective response to those problems.

The post holder will proactively seek out problems rather than wait for them to arise. They will act as a single point of contact to partner agencies in relation to each prison’s housing response.

Resource Management & Financial Impact

The post holder does not have budget responsibility. The post holder will have no separate budget to manage. Their role has no direct impact on costs.

The post holder may choose to develop opportunities to work with the National Education Contracts Management Team to secure funding for training packages for prisoners and separate housing-related training for staff. This would involve projecting training costs of different sized cohorts of candidates, and then producing tenders (i.e. via the Dynamic Procurement System) to ensure suitable training providers are contracted to deliver the provision. The post holder would need work in partnership with the Head of Reducing Reoffending, Learning and Skills Manager and the prison Business Hub to deliver such initiatives.

Organising & Planning

The post holder will carry out a full review of the housing landscape at each prison they are allocated to. They will then be tasked with developing an action plan for each prison outlining a suite of workable solutions or activities to each problem or workstream they identify. They should then use that action plan to implement those solutions through effective project management.

Many of the barriers or problems that the post holder identifies are likely to be complex, long-standing and deep-rooted (given our learning from existing post holders to date). It is therefore likely that they will require carefully considered solutions with thorough planning in order to achieve maximum impact. They will also need to carefully prepare and manage resources in order to deliver solutions.

An example is where a post holder might identify a training need for prisoners around housing, such as tenancy readiness training. In such a scenario the post holder may be required to carry out a full needs analysis, liaise with department heads (education, reducing reoffending), author a proposal for the training course, issue a tender via the Dynamic Procurement System (or equivalent), and then oversee the implementation of the course in partnership with the successful provider using ‘SMART’ delivery principles. They will then review the delivery of the course in order to plan future delivery.

The post holder must be able to organise their own work and to prioritise their workloads without supervision.

The post holder is required to monitor the performance of their work, taking any necessary action to ensure that systemic barriers are identified and removed. For example, housing providers with complicated assessment processes, such as some local authorities, should be supported to produce a more accessible system, which is more appropriate for those applying for housing from a custodial environment.

People Management

The post holder has no direct line management responsibilities but should support senior managers in the effective management of more junior team members and other services within the reducing reoffending remit.

Information Management

The post holder will support prisons, PGDs, and relevant partner agencies (such as HPTs) to improve the quality and use of data where it relates to prisoners and housing outcomes, including the use for research and service design and provision.

They should seek to use data and information sources to develop strategies and to continually make improvements to accommodation outcomes.

The post holder will understand and comply with the requirements of the Data Protection Act and HMPPS information assurance policy to ensure maintenance of confidentiality, availability and integrity of data. They will ensure compliance with requirements of different security markings.

Influencing & Interaction

The post holder is responsible for developing good working relationships with key strategic housing stakeholders, probation commissioned rehabilitative services (CRS), and Homelessness Prevention Teams (HPTs) to implement sustainable change, including where this feeds into other government departments and local authorities. They will ensure that work between each prison and relevant HPTs continues to integrate. The post holder should be able to use these relationships to improve whole system performance and deliver improvements in the volume of prison leavers accessing accommodation on release.

The post holder will therefore need to be a first-class communicator and be able to influence all stakeholders by enabling them to realise how working together can be mutually beneficial.

The post holder will be expected to challenge stakeholders when there are concerns in respect of the quality of their work and demonstrate the capacity to be able to respond positively when challenged in a similar vein.

The post holder will be responsible for identifying suitable accommodation options and pathways for prison leavers.

The post holder will provide training/briefing & support for prisoners and staff to ensure there is an understanding of housing rights and good tenancy behaviour within the prison, with a view to ensure prison leavers are properly equipped to secure and keep accommodation tenancy on release.

The post holder must be able to explain logistical issues to senior managers with clarity and accuracy.

The post holder must influence stakeholders in respect of timely completion of work to remove barriers and improve accommodation outcomes for prison leavers on release.

Emotional Demand & Risk

This is not a prisoner or offender-facing role; however, the post holder may be asked to advise on particularly complex housing cases. The post holder needs to understand how different offences could hamper a prison leaver’s housing options.

This post requires resilience and emotional stamina to deal with the challenge that faces HMPPS in delivering the reducing reoffending vision and CJTF targets. The post holder is required to defend the decisions made about the cross- cutting design, development and implementation of the delivery programme.

The job holder is responsible for disrupting and challenging existing thinking across prisons. Challenging conversations and difficult decisions will need to be made which may not always be popular and will require sensitivity.

Some of the work may require attendance outside of core hours and job holders will be expected to travel to other sites, if required.

This job is broadly open to the following groups:

• UK nationals
• nationals of the Republic of Ireland
• nationals of Commonwealth countries who have the right to work in the UK
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities with settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS) (opens in a new window)
• nationals of the EU, Switzerland, Norway, Iceland or Liechtenstein and family members of those nationalities who have made a valid application for settled or pre-settled status under the European Union Settlement Scheme (EUSS)
• individuals with limited leave to remain or indefinite leave to remain who were eligible to apply for EUSS on or before 31 December 2020
• Turkish nationals, and certain family members of Turkish nationals, who have accrued the right to work in the Civil Service

Further information on nationality requirements (opens in a new window)

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours and Strengths.

https://justicejobs.tal.net/vx/candidate/cms/About%20the%20MOJ

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