Readiness and Resilience Lead

Do you care about the safety of products and want to protect people and places? Can we use your skills, knowledge and experience to enable UK business to thrive? If the answer is yes, then we would like to hear from you! We are the Office for Product Safety and Standards (OPSS), part of the Department for Business & Trade. We are here for the purpose of making regulation work to deliver real world impact. Regulation is a powerful Government tool to address market failures, influence behaviour and promote positive action. Crafted and delivered well, regulation can be an enabler of growth, innovation and efficiency. Since early 2018 we have been building a positive and creative team that enjoys a position of influence and respect within an organisation that continues to grow. Our primary purpose is to protect people and places from product-related harm, ensuring consumers and businesses can buy and sell products with confidence Further information can be found on our website here. We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission's recruitment principles. We embrace diversity and promote equality of opportunity. We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives and skills. There is a guaranteed interview scheme (DCS) for people with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria. We are Inclusive We are fully committed to being an inclusive employer and ensuring equal opportunities. We are keen to make our workforce as diverse as possible and recognise how important inclusivity is to achieve the best outcomes. We hope to attract applications from all underrepresented groups. We will ensure that individuals with disabilities are provided reasonable accommodation if required to participate in the job application or interview process, to perform crucial job functions, and to receive other benefits and privileges of employment. Please contact us to request accommodation. The Incident Management Team (IMT) is a busy, friendly and highly supportive team, comprised of two closely related functions. A readiness and resilience arm prepares OPSS to respond to national-scale incidents, emergencies and disruptive events. We develop and exercise a range of incident response plans and related procedures and ensure processes are continuously improved considering lessons arising from exercises or incidents. An operational arm carries out initial assessments of product safety and noncompliance notifications, publishing product safety alerts, reports and recalls on publicly available websites and working internationally to report product safety issues and to monitor for product safety issues that might impact the UK. IMT also lead on the coordination of incident activity, liaising with a range of OPSS and wider functions to ensure an effective incident response is delivered., Lead a number of workstreams within the readiness and resilience arm of the team. The workstreams may include:

• Supporting teams across OPSS to assess and test contingency plans and processes.
• Helping to devise, plan and deliver an exercise programme that rehearses and tests incident responses.
• Carrying out post-exercise / post-incident evaluations and ensure lessons identified are reviewed and embed the lessons learned into business practice.
• Working with teams across OPSS to identify central training requirements in respect of readiness and resilience. This may include assessment of lessons identified, development of training needs analysis and crafting, develop and deliver (where appropriate) readiness and resilience training.
• Ensuring that those you manage understand and identify with the reasons for change and be able to champion a continuous improvement approach and the use of Programme/Project Management principles.
• Supporting the activities of the operational arm as determined by business need.
• Managing at least one Incident Officer (HEO)
• The role may require the post holder to undertake an out of hours rota, provide flexible support to product safety incidents and may involve working additional hours when these occur.
• The role will also require some travel throughout the UK. Travel and Subsistence is available in this eventuality.