Head of Highways

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.

• 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
  
  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.
  
  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.