West Kent Housing Association

Head of voids and Lettings at west Kent housing. 
Part of the senior leadership team within the organisation. 
Board member-Kent Homechoice. 
Managing the voids and Lettings performance and the strategic direction of the team. 
Managing all aspects of empty homes, throughout the void process and up to and including let. Managing new build Lettings, within a developing HA. 
Ensuring customers are at the heart of all decisions.  
Since January 2024, heading up the Customer Services team, and the Planning function. 
Customer Services is the voice of the customer throughout the organisation, taking the vast majority of inbound communications from customers and resolving at first point of contact. 
Planners are a dedicated scheduling team, ensuring customer repairs are correctly and effectiveness scheduled into engineers diaries.

Head of Voids and Lettings, Customer Services and Planners

One Housing

Managing the Allocations and Onboarding function, including Lettings, management moves, mutual exchanges, transfers, decants. 
Helping customers settle into and manage the crucial early stages of tenancy.

Head of Allocations and Onboarding

Catalyst Housing Limited

Managing the Income and Allocations teams in a large Housing Association.
Line Manager of 4 Team Managers who manage Allocations coordinators, Income Specialists, Mobile Specialists, Service Specialists and Income Assistants.

Income and Allocations Manager

Managed Income Specialists in a large Housing Association, with a base in London and the South East of England.
Managing the Income processes, and ensuring Policy and Procedure keep pace with a radically changing external environment.
Ensuring that Welfare Reform is at the heart of business thinking, and assisting the association develop their welfare reform response.

Income Manager

Optivo

Managed the strategic business response to welfare reform across the former Viridian part of the amalgamated business structure.
Developing and delivering Training on all aspects of welfare reform to all business units.
Managing a team of expert Financial Inclusion Officers who provide advice, support and information to residents in all aspects of Financial Inclusion and money management.
Managing 9 Financial Inclusion Officers in multiple regions, including London, the Midlands and Sussex.
Developing the Money Mentors volunteer money advice role, to further enhance financial literacy across our customer group.

Achievements:
•	Chair of G15 London Housing Financial Inclusion Group
•	Made the greatest financial gains of all comparable sized Financial Inclusion Teams in HA’s within the sector (over £25 million in three years)
•	Trained government - DCLG Civil Service - in Financial Inclusion as part of their Core departmental training
•	Submitted evidence for NHF case study in a House of Lords Select Committee on welfare reform
•	Liaised and consulted with FCA to re: impact of illegal money lending on housing
•	Wrote article on welfare reform for National Housing Federation's Housing Week - one of only 5 housing managers nationally to be asked to contribute.
•	Guest speaker at a National Housing Federation's national  Housing Finance conference - speaking on protecting income during welfare reform 
•	Wrote articles in national publications - the New Statesman and Politics First

Financial Inclusion Manager

Elevate East London LLP

Managed the business contracts and SLAs on behalf of Elevate – a public/private partnership. I managed service improvements, designed initiatives to improve efficiency, and championed innovation. 
Managed a team of Service Improvement Officers and the departmental Training Officer – responsible for service innovation, business process analysis, business improvements, channel shift strategy. 

I managed the borough's Corporate Complaints team in addition to my substantive post. The team dealt with all Stage One and Stage two Complaints, DPA and FOI requests.

I was the interim service manager of the Housing Repairs Contact Centre for 4 months, in addition to my substantive post. 

Achievements:
•	Project Management and sitting on the project board of large scale council projects
•	Leading on channel shift initiatives - including creating and building web chat service offerings. 
•	Managed the Service Level Agreements which identify the scope of services which are handled in customer services
•	Wrote the channel shift strategy, detailing how the council will use web chat and roadblocks to steer customers to online services
•	Briefed cabinet office (national government) on channel shift and online engagement.

Service Level and Quality Manager

Leonard Cheshire Disability

Helped start a major project for the charity in Southwark - building up strong local contacts with other charities and the Local Authority, and establishing the project as a locally successful advice agency.
Managed a client caseload across two projects, the bank workers charity and the Southwark Action Plus project. 
I represented disabled clients at court, attended tribunals, appealed DLA and other benefits decisions, written appeal letters regarding immigration decisions. Assisted disabled clients to access a wide range of services within the community, enhancing social inclusion and empowerment.

Client Support Advisor (IAG) - Project Officer

Shepherds Bush Housing Group

Responsible for ensuring the effective performance of the Income Team: conducting one to ones and appraisals, and ensuring the Income Officers compliance with housing regulations. 
Introduced many different strategies to increase Financial Inclusion, including: A regular Money Advice service, self-help debt pack, arrears actions leaflet and promoting debt advice services held in local authorities.
- Wrote the formulas that formed the association’s approach to the Affordable Rents policy. 
- Developed spread-sheets which enabled the association to accurately monitor financial data, including the weekly, monthly and annual rent collection levels. 
- Achieved the highest Income collection performance in the association's history.

InComE Project Manager (secondment in addition to substantive role)
October 2011 – February 2012
Managed a team of caseworkers, providing support and guidance to young people in order to reduce overcrowding in the social housing sector.
Assisted officers to develop employment strategies, delivering a project which helped young people who are NEET develop life skills, training opportunities and tenancy management skills.
Introduced a new casework management database, to enable the project caseworkers to more effectively manage their cases.

London Borough of Lewisham

Responsible for the direct line management of a team of 12 staff, and for the operational performance management of over 100 front line officers, within Lewisham Council’s Revenues and Benefits call centre.
Responsible for all aspects of line management for my direct reports, as well as being operationally responsible for the performance management and resource planning of the entire front line service. 
Key part of the management team, and was on the project board which commissioned investment in developing a council-wide CRM system. 
Wrote the entire front-end process mapping behind the CRM system and was trained to deliver Equalities Impact Assessments of the system processes. 
Lead Complaints Manager within the service, and helped form a focus group, looking at driving up standards by combining the approached towards training, quality and complaints into one holistic approach.
•	Operational performance manager/resource planning manager in the service, increasing performance and exceeding all KPI’s.
•	On project board which Introduced a CRM system, from inception to installation, business process re-engineering and project management which increased end to end customer service.
•	Project board member on key council projects, including the vital Council Tax end of year project.
•	Introduced an innovative method of increasing Council-wide on-line take up, increasing the number of customers accessing on-line services by 500%.

CallPoint Team Manager

Direct Line Manager of eight staff, dealing with performance management, one to ones, staff development and training. 
Responsible for several large scale training programmes, trained over 100 staff in our replacement Document Imaging system, and Academy Revenues and Benefits system. 
Wrote all of the customer service staff training packs for these systems.
Provided support to officers dealing with complex cases, and challenging customers. 
Voted Team Member of the year, and then Manager of the Year in successive customer Services awards. 
- A shortlisted nominee for Lewisham’s Pride awards, for outstanding Learning and Development.
Achievements
- Trained staff across the service in Academy and Anite systems, writing the training packs and assisting all staff to use these systems. Interpreted Benefits and Council Tax legislation to disseminate to all customer service staff.
- Developed my team members who I trained to become managers within the service. 
- Voted Team Member of the year and Manager of the year in Customer Service awards.

AccessPoint Assistant Team Manager

Front line (face to face) officer, dealing with enquiries about Council Tax and Housing Benefits. I was required to meet KPI's for calling customers, and quickly became the highest enquiry-taker within the service, while maintaining excellent quality. I became very proficient at dealing with enquires, and an expert on complex and difficult cases. I was the top performer within the service, and was voted AccessPoint Officer of the year in our Customer Services awards.

AccessPoint Officer

Barclays Bank UK PLC

Bank clerk, dealing with the processing of large scale banking transactions, including: Closed accounts, Unpaids, Standing Orders and Direct Debits, Stopped cheques, Fraud and Large cheque verifications. I was also responsible for dealing with telephony enquiries, and performed actions such as bill payments and transfer, on behalf of customers, over the phone. I was trained in all aspects of banking and double-entry book-keeping in this role.

Processing Clerk

- Former Board member and Non-exec Director- Locata Housing services. 
- Member of NHF Strategic Welfare Reform group.  
- 7 years chair of London Housing Financial Inclusion Group. 
I am an experienced Housing and public sector Head of service/ manager, with excellent knowledge of Housing operations, Allocations, Income, Financial Inclusion, customer experience, training, quality, project/programme management. 
I have extensive training experience on welfare rights, welfare benefits, Housing Benefit law and Financial Inclusion. This includes providing training across various Housing Associations,  delivering speeches on welfare reform at national conferences, and training DCLG staff. 
I am committed to delivering improvements in quality, have excellent experience of quality assurance processes. I have extensive experience of writing procedure documents and contributing to policy development.
I am innovative and will often seek imaginative solutions to problems, which are replicated by others. Including:
- Developing a systematic, robust and rigorous approach to welfare reform and Financial Inclusion that led to sector leading results in both areas.

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