Deputy Director Funding, Strategy & Sponsorship

Birmingham, Leeds, London

As the Deputy Director for the high performing Funding, Strategy & Sponsorship Division, you will provide strong leadership on a range of cross-cutting issues across the programme, working closely with Phase leads, colleagues from across the Department and HM Treasury. You will also oversee the core relationship with HS2 Ltd through ownership of the Development Agreement and key sponsorship policy areas. You will work closely with your fellow Deputy Directors and have regular exposure to our Senior Leadership Team where your views and advice will be relied upon to inform our strategic decision-making.

This role has become available at a critical time for the programme – following the Network North announcement it is now essential that we work closely with all Rail policy areas to ensure that the future HS2 railway line integrates seamlessly and effectively with the conventional rail network.

As this is Government’s largest infrastructure programme, it rightly attracts scrutiny from across all political levels up to and including the Prime Minister. As such, you will lead your team and wider parts of the Group to ensure that we demonstrate an improved culture of cost control and deliver value for money to taxpayers.

You will lead the Group’s General Election planning and as part of that the strategy to inform our next Spending Review bid, which will require forming strong and trusted relationships with senior colleagues across Whitehall. Through your exemplary leadership, you will also lead the next phase of work to re-write the Secretary of State’s Development Agreement with HS2 Ltd, which governs how the railway is delivered and the requirements we consider as essential sponsor priorities.

This is a senior role with a significant leadership component, and you will deploy your expertise in project delivery as well as leading your team and maintaining high performance. The successful post-holder will establish and maintain strong relationships with key stakeholders including HS2 Ltd, DfT Strategic Finance and HM Treasury, utilising strong communication and influencing skills.

Main responsibilities to include:

• Enhanced cost control – Following the Network North announcement and with renewed political focus on ensuring value for money, you will work closely with senior HS2 Ltd staff, including their Chief Financial Officer and Finance Director, as well as HM Treasury, to provide enhanced financial reporting. This will cover both in-year where we are forecasting more than £7bn of expenditure, over fiscal event periods, as well as the life of the Programme. You will demonstrate a firm grasp of cost drivers, be able to articulate reasons for cost variances and present regularly to senior decision-making bodies such as Sponsor Board.
• Leading on overall HS2 cost narrative – Your team will be responsible for leading on the overall costs position for HS2. You will work closely with Phase teams in High-Speed Rail Group and HS2 Ltd to ensure consistent messaging about HS2’s costs and affordability. You will form strong working relationships with Phase One colleagues to drive a collective culture of robust sponsorship of HS2 Ltd in delivering efficiently the remaining scope, as well as providing strategic advice in helping the latter Phases reach a controlled shut-down following the Network North announcement.
• Preparing for the next Spending Review – You will lead your Division and inform the Group’s strategy over the next 12 months where we expect the existing or future Government to announce a Spending Review. This will be challenging work where you will ensure that the case for HS2 is articulated strongly in order to safeguard the funding required to deliver HS2 on time and within budget. You will draw on your strong relationships across the Group to emphasise the local growth, regeneration and environmental benefits of this transformational Programme.
• Re-defining the contractual relationship between the Secretary of State and HS2 Ltd – You will lead exciting and challenging work to ensure that the Development Agreement which governs our relationship with HS2 Ltd is fit for purpose. This will involve leading your team to identify the right level of “Sponsor Requirements”, ensuring that our incentives of HS2 Ltd are sufficiently robust and ensuring that HS2 Ltd is prioritising on the right outcomes to best deliver the Programme. This will involve making the case to SLT, Ministers and HM Treasury, as well as leading work with HS2 Ltd to redefine the relationship.
• Leadership of several Sponsorship initiatives – These include the regular 6 monthly reports to Parliament where your team will lead work across the Group to ensure that Parliament is regularly apprised of progress with key issues and risks flagged appropriately. The reports have recently attracted interest from HM Treasury and Number 10, and you will skillfully navigate these approvals to deliver within often constrained timescales. You will also lead work on securing cross-DfT agreement to create a Venture Capital Innovation fund – an exciting “spend to save” project that could deliver significant value for money to taxpayers.
• Providing strategic direction for the Group – You will lead and build your Strategy branch of the Division, ensuring that current areas of focus, such as developing Roadmaps on our ambitious decarbonisation and biodiversity objectives, are delivered in a way that helps meet our environmental targets, whilst acknowledging financial trade-offs. You will provide strategic advice and leadership to the rest of the Group on a range of matters including integration with the conventional network. In addition, as part of the Strategy branch you will oversee the briefing & correspondence team, ensuring robust briefing for the Programme for set-piece events such as Public Accounts Committees, as well as providing the briefing on the vast array of correspondence concerning the Programme.

You will need to be able to show, through your application, that you have the professional skills, breadth of experience and personal qualities for this post, as well as the leadership skills to succeed at Deputy Director level in the Senior Civil Service.

The successful candidate must be able to demonstrate their capabilities and experience in the following areas:

• An excellent leader of people who improves capability and leads through change to build a diverse, inclusive and multi-disciplinary team.

• An ability to deliver results across organisational boundaries using soft power, influencing and contractual obligations where necessary.

• Financially numerate and commercially savvy to support and challenge HS2 Ltd and its supply chain in delivering to budget, schedule and quality.

• You will be a confident, articulate communicator and a trusted adviser with outstanding interpersonal skills and experience of building effective and influential relationships with senior stakeholders.

Desirable:

• Experience of major project delivery from one or more of infrastructure, ICT, transformation, or weapon systems
• Experience of close working with HMT and/or a Spending Review/fiscal event

We’ll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Leadership
• Seeing the Big Picture
• Working Together
• Changing and Improving

Alongside your salary of £75,000, Department for Transport contributes
£20,250 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme.

Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

Whatever your role, we take your career and development seriously, and want to enable you to build a really successful career with the Department and wider Civil Service.

It is crucial that our employees have the right skills to develop their careers and meet the challenges ahead, and you’ll benefit from regular performance and development reviews to ensure this development is ongoing. As a Civil Service employee, you’ll be entitled to a large range of benefits.

Equality, Diversity & Inclusion

The Civil Service values and supports all its employees. 

We have strong and pro-active staff networks, special leave policies for hospital appointments, reasonable adjustments put in place for those who need them, and diversity talent programmes to help everyone irrespective of background, to achieve their potential.

Pension

Your pension is a valuable part of your total reward package.

A competitive contributory pension scheme that you can enter as soon as you join where we will make a significant contribution to the cost of your pension; where your contributions come out of your salary before any tax is taken; and where your pension will continue to provide valuable benefits for you and your family if you are too ill to continue to work or die before you retire. Visit Civil Service Pension Scheme for more details.

Generous Annual Leave and Bank Holiday Allowance

25 days annual leave on entry, increasing on a sliding scale to 30 days after 5 years’ service (allowance is pro rata for part-time employees). This is in addition to 8 public holidays.

This will be complimented by one further day paid privilege entitlement to mark the King’s Birthday.

Staff Wellbeing

Flexible working including part-time or time-term working and access to Flexible Working Schemes allowing you to vary your working day as long as you work your total hours.

Generous paid maternity and paternity leave which is notably more than the statutory minimum offered by many other employers.

Childcare benefits (policy for new employees as of 5 April 2018): The government has introduced the Tax-Free Childcare (TFC) scheme. Working parents can open an online childcare account and for every £8 they pay in, the government adds £2, up to a maximum of £2000 a year for each child or £4000 for a disabled child. Parents then use the funds to pay for registered childcare. Existing employees may be able to continue to claim childcare vouchers, so please check how the policy would work for you here. Any move to the DfT from another employer will mean you can no longer access childcare vouchers. This includes moves between government departments.  

Onsite facilities Opportunity to use onsite facilities including fitness centres and staff canteens (where applicable).

This role has a minimum assignment duration of 3 years. An assignment duration
is the period of time a Senior Civil Servant is expected to remain in the same post to enable them
to deliver on the agreed key business outcomes. The assignment duration also supports your career through
building your depth of expertise.

As part of accepting this role you will be agreeing to the expected assignment duration set out above.
This will not result in a contractual change to your terms and conditions.
Please note this is an expectation only, it is not something which is written into your terms and
conditions or indeed which the employing organisation or you are bound by. It will depend on your
personal circumstances at a particular time and business needs, for example, would not preclude any
absence like family friendly leave. It is nonetheless an important expectation, which is why we ask you
to confirm you agree to the assignment duration set out above.

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Job contact :

• Name : SCS Recruitment Team
• Email : scscandidate.grs@cabinetoffice.gov.uk

Recruitment team

• Email : scscandidate.grs@cabinetoffice.gov.uk