Litigation Senior Caseworker
| Posting date: | 18 March 2025 |
|---|---|
| Salary: | £44,720 to £47,850 per year |
| Hours: | Full time |
| Closing date: | 01 April 2025 |
| Location: | Glasgow |
| Company: | Government Recruitment Service |
| Job type: | Permanent |
| Job reference: | 395472/1 |
Summary
The Customer Services Group brings together Asylum & Human Rights, Asylum Support and Dispersal, Asylum Accommodation Centres, Resettlement Group, Passports, Citizenship & Civil Registration, Customer Operations Support Services and UK Visas & Immigration. As a major operational arm of the Home Office, we play a vital role in supporting the economy and cultural life of the UK.
Customer Services is a recently established capability, playing a key role within the Migration and Borders System. Customer Services has typically over 13m customers annually, with a workforce of over 14,000 across its legacy constituent business units including: Asylum & Human Rights, Visas and Citizenship (V&C), His Majesty’s Passport Office (HMPO), and the General Registrar Office (GRO). We take a customer-led approach to delivering services, whilst always maintaining robust security controls.
Appeals, Litigation and Administrative Review (part of Customer Operations Support Services) is responsible for dealing with all applications where an appeal or legal challenge has been lodged, and to defend those where it is appropriate to do so, and to provide a casework remedy for applications that do not meet the Immigration-Rules and are not entitled to a full right of appeal.
The successful candidates will report directly to a G7 head of unit. They will provide timely, accurate, consistent and clear technical support to the team while working in partnership with HEO senior caseworkers and team leaders to develop the capability of the EO caseworkers.
They will review and provide advice on key documents produced and decisions taken by HEO senior caseworkers and/or EO litigation caseworkers and external stakeholders, including decisions on whether a case is defended or settled. They will work closely with HEO and SEO senior caseworkers across Litigation Operations, as well as other key stakeholders such as Policy, HOLA, Government Legal Department lawyers and Counsel, to ensure consistency of legal argument. They can expect to work on high-profile litigation challenges across a variety of immigration routes, often attracting public and media interest.
They will also work with G7 head of unit and other senior officials in supporting ministers and handling outwards-facing issues, such as drafting or providing contributions to submissions, briefings and media handling lines.
They must be able to take a realistic view of the Department’s prospects of success by defending the right cases or conceding, when appropriate, as early as possible in order to reduce costs. They will keep abreast of developments in case law, policy, legislation, mentorship, and country information.
The successful candidate will line manage HEO senior caseworkers, helping them handle their own portfolios of significant litigation, developing their expertise and specialisms in the process. This will include monitoring case progression, running complex and high-profile cases themselves, mapping out legal and mitigation strategies and representing the team on Virtual Litigation Teams.
Key Responsibilities (will include, but not limited to):
- Counter-sampling quality assurance checks/case audits as appropriate, discussing results with staff members to improve quality of work
- Contributing towards the management or delivery of ad-hoc pieces of work, often linked to high profile litigation, whilst still running a demanding portfolio of work to deliver on business-as-usual functions
- Providing excellent leadership to the team, in particular when facilitating conversations between Litigation Operations colleagues, operational and policy counterparts, as well as external partners such as Government Legal Department
- Exercising delegated authority to authorise litigation costs to a predetermined financial level
- Contributing and responding to ad-hoc data requests and/or scenario planning from the Senior Leadership Team
- Acting as an informed point of contact for managers and escalating information as appropriate
- Being a positive role model, championing the equality and diversity principles of the Department
- Contributing to delivery of training whether for new entrants or refresher for existing staff
Working Pattern:
This role is available on a full-time basis.
We encourage applications from candidates who wish to work part-time; however, part-time opportunities cannot be guaranteed and are subject to the requirements of the role and business. Candidates wishing to work part-time should notify the vacancy holder as soon as a provisional offer of employment is made, to explore whether this can be accommodated at your selected location.
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