Assistant Service Manager, Bookings and Cancellations (Mat Cover)

About us at Hounslow

We’d love you to join us at the London Borough of Hounslow! Our people are deeply committed to providing excellent services to our residents, doing all we can to make lives as good as they can be.

We are an outstanding council, serving an outstanding borough. With brilliant, visionary leadership, a dynamic Cabinet and a can-do culture, we’ve built strong partnerships which have transformed how we serve one of London’s most diverse boroughs. Hounslow is the world in one place and full of potential.  We are stepping up for our residents like never before.

About our Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

We live by five core values: Lead with Heart, Do New, Pass on the Power, Harness the Mix and Be a Rock.  All our work has equality, diversity and inclusion at its very heart, best articulated in “Harness the Mix”. It's about breaking down barriers between our parts and people and unlocking the problem-solving power of our amazing mix of minds. We serve a diverse community, we have a diverse workforce and we are committed to being an inclusive employer.

We work hard to create representation across our workforce and leadership community, we have thriving employee network groups and our learning and development programmes help us lead, model and breathe ways of working that eliminate inequality, inequity, injustice and bias.

As part of this and under our commitments as a Disability Confident Employer, we make reasonable adjustments to accommodate our candidates.  There’s space for you to tell us what you need within our application form.

Our Benefits

If you join us, you’ll have access to a range of employee benefits. Read more about these here.

About The Role

This is an exciting opportunity to join Homelessness, Independence and Preventative Services, Temporary Accommodation, Bookings & Cancellations Service, which adopts a preventative approach across the housing, health and social care agendas.  Your primary focus will be to operationally lead the Council’s placements into all forms of temporary accommodation and effective move-on into different housing pathways. You must be professional, energetic and enthusiastic as we are interested in what you can bring to help us improve and develop our services to support some of our most vulnerable residents. 

You will be required to manage a team of three Bookings & Cancellations Officers. You must be able to learn and develop your knowledge required for this role and be able to travel independently around the Borough. 

About The Team You’ll Be Working In

This is an exciting and busy role that is at the centre of the Councils response to homelessness. The service is developing and progressing our agenda to reduce the use of temporary accommodation and achieve more upstream prevention outcomes.

1. You will manage the effective allocation of all types of temporary accommodation including daily emergencies, cancellations and transfers; and to ensure that the placement of suitable accommodation is sufficient to meet with clients' individual needs and service demands. the Bookings & Cancellations Officer are motivational to ensure a high-quality service is delivered. 

2. You are an expert negotiator with a wide range of professionals to ensure the best possible outcomes can be achieved while recognising conflicting priorities.  You organise your team to be highly efficient and effective in their roles, balancing the need to work independently but collaboratively to meet contextual needs.  You are proactive in reviewing and evaluating your own performance and acting on your own initiative to improve and develop. 

3. Manage workloads within and across teams to flex resources where needed to ensure workloads are balanced to prevent backlogs arising, i.e. backlog of housing benefit claims, setting up rent accounts, updating accommodation fields on housing databases for accurate recording of TA numbers, placements and move-on.  

4. You will manage allocated staff and resources using core processes and procedures consistently across the assigned operational activities in an efficient manner that is in compliance with all relevant policies and guidelines.

About You

1. You have a strong ability to lead, motivate, manage and develop staff in a challenging, high volume, fast paced working environment, supporting staff to deal effectively with the demands of frontline work while delivering key service objectives.
2. You have expert communication skills both verbally and in writing to engage effectively with a broad range of people to influence, negotiate and persuade and achieve multidisciplinary outcomes across services.
3. You act with integrity, take personal responsibility and handle stress effectively, being a confident decision maker while motivating others to achieve successful corporate preventative outcomes, using proactive and creative solutions.
4. You work flexibly and independently, adapting to changing needs and proactively keep the team up to date with legislation, policy and guidance to ensure legally compliant recommendations and decisions.
5. You have excellent analytical and problem-solving skills, a comprehensive understanding of issues faced by vulnerable people and you work collaboratively with others to meet a range of needs while leading and managing a team to achieve targets and service objectives and make the team the very best it can be.

Qualifications:

1. You have a degree or relevant work-based experience in similar environment dealing with vulnerable households and engaging in continual professional development.
2. You can travel independently around the Borough to visit residents in their homes and meet other professionals in community settings.
3. A basic DBS check is required.

If the points below resonate with you, we’d love you to put in an application:

Are you passionate about customer services?

Are you an experienced homelessness professional?

Are you looking to working in a forward thinking and progressive housing department?

Read more about the work you’ll be doing in the Role Profile.

The key information you need about the role should be in the Role Profile, but if you have any further questions about the role, please contact:

Email: Paul.Nally@hounslow.gov.uk

Interviews for this job will be held during July 2025.

Closing date – 9^th July 2025