Do you want to help make Northumberland a 'Land of Great Opportunities'?
ROLE OF THE JOB
We are restructuring the management arrangements for our Highways, Transport and Climate Change services to create two new Heads of Service. These new roles will provide additional senior management capacity to lead these high-profile services, ensuring they maximise their contribution towards our key corporate objectives of Driving Economic Growth, Tackling Inequalities and Delivering Value for Money.
We are looking for an inspirational and experienced highways professional who will drive forward our Highways service ensuring that we maintain a high performing, responsive network, co-ordinating access and minimising disruption, offering sustainable transport choices, ensuring safety for all users, facilitating our regeneration and sustainable growth ambitions and delivering excellent value for money.
You will be responsible for leading the teams that manage, maintain and improve the county's highways infrastructure. This includes over 5,000 kilometres of roads, 2,500 kilometres of footways, 3,500 structures including iconic bridges like the 400 year old Berwick Old Bridge spanning the River Tweed. You will be the Council's principal technical advisor for highways, developing strategy and policy and making sure that our highways construction, maintenance and improvement programmes and projects are being delivered effectively and efficiently. You will actively seek out opportunities for improvement and be responsible for taking these from business case development through to delivery.
You will have management responsibility for over 340 staff covering a wide range of professional, technical and operational roles. These include our highways design, infrastructure and asset management, highways laboratory, streetworks, parking services, passenger transport, street lighting, development management and flood and coastal erosion management teams, as well as our own large direct workforce undertaking a comprehensive range of highway construction and maintenance activity across the county.
You will be responsible for managing a gross service budget of approximately £81m (£32.330m gross revenue and £48.924m capital), with projects and programmes ranging from delivery of public realm improvements as part of town centre regeneration schemes, construction of new active travel infrastructure, expansion of Electric Vehicle charging infrastructure, development and delivery of flood and coastal erosion protection schemes, delivery of a £26m Local Transport Plan capital programme through to routine revenue maintenance activity like gully cleansing and pothole repairs.
You will have a proven track record of leadership success in delivering operational Highways services including major construction and maintenance programmes and projects and of working with partners at local, regional and national level to achieve ambitious plans.
Benefits:
- Band 15 - £90,819 and benefits package (Cycle to Work Scheme, Salary Sacrifice Scheme, 6.5% Pension contribution, Flexi Working and Hybrid working)
- Working within Environment and Transport as part of the wider Place and Regeneration Directorate, you will be part of a team that is responsible for maintaining and enhancing the built and natural environment across Northumberland, ensuring we deliver our net-zero goals.
Location: County Hall Morpeth/remote (once a week in the office required)
Contract type: Permanent
Interviews - w/c 13th January 2025
REQUIREMENTS OF THE JOB
- Educated to degree level in discipline relevant to highways and transport.
- Chartered Engineer or other relevant professional qualification.
- Experience of leading and successfully managing large scale and complex capital and revenue highways and infrastructure projects and programmes, including budget and financial management and systems and processes to manage the health and safety of the workforce and public.
- Ability to operate sensitively in a political environment, developing relationships with all members gaining respect, trust, and confidence
For further details please refer to the job description/person spec.
Why choose us?
Northumberland County Council's (NCC) vision is ‘Land of Great Opportunities', for current and future generations. We believe there is no better place to live and work.
For further information about working for NCC, please visit our website
here.
To see all our excellent benefits and perks, please click
here.
Further information
Please note that this is a permanent position but applications on a secondment or part-time basis would be considered for the right applicant.
For guidance on completing your application and for information about our Equality and Diversity principles, please see the attached guidance notes
here.
We are proud to be an equal opportunities employer. We operate a guaranteed interview scheme for disabled applicants who meet the essential criteria. If you wish to notify us of your eligibility for this scheme, please email
hrrecruitment@northumberland.gov.uk or ring 01670 623930 with your name and the job title you have applied for and one of the recruitment team will ensure this is factored into the shortlisting process and kept anonymous. If you have a disability and would prefer to apply in a different format, please see the alternative methods below. This information will be treated as confidential and will only be used to check that you meet the essential requirements of the post.
Alternative application format:
For those with speech difficulties or hearing loss:
Text relay service dial 018001 01670 623930