Head of Natural Environment

Location - Birmingham or London

Salary Birmingham: “Base salary: £79,035pa to c£92,982pa depending on skills and experience

Salary London: “Base salary: £85,358pa to c£100,421pa depending on skills and experience

In addition, we offer a flexible benefits fund of 20% which is paid on top of base salary and is fully pensionable, as well as a range of competitive benefits - check them out in the Benefits section on our website.

HS2 Ltd endeavours to ensure everyone working for us and with us feels included, thrives and achieves their full potential. In practice, this means we are positive and inclusive about making adjustments, providing flexible working, encouraging our staff networks to flourish and providing personal and professional development opportunities.

As a Head of Natural Environment at HS2 you will be responsible for overseeing the Natural Environment discipline teams that act as the technical environmental authority for HS2 Ltd to set and assure the environmental technical requirements and standards for the project and determine policies in conjunction with National Authorities and operate to Ministerial level.

About the role:

- Accountability for providing professional and functional leadership to natural environment disciplines within Environment Technical Services in accordance with policies and standards set up by the appropriate HS2 functions. (Ecology & Biodiversity, Landscape, Water, Waste and Agriculture)

- Acts as HS2 Ltd’s professional lead for Landscape Design capability and specifically accountable for ensuring the delivery of the HS2 Green Corridor, defining strategies, key deliverables and benchmarked outputs in support of HS2 Design Vision principles and the delivery of discipline related EMRs / U&As.

- Responsible for ensuring landscape design and ecological requirements under the High-Speed Rail Act, EMRs, external legislation and relevant technical standards are met and assurance of this evidenced and ensure departures for these are technically appraised and scrutinised.

- Ensure environmental specialists maintain technical standards that support the development, design, construction and operational delivery of the new railway. Ensuring technical standards remain compliant with HS2 LTD Act(s), other Legislation, Environmental Minimum Requirements (EMRs) and continue to remain relevant.

- Manage the provision of specialist advice to support Delivery and Rail Development in carrying out their respective delivery requirements, realise effective environmental outcomes and enable their assurance of Environment & Sustainability evidence to meet Environmental Assessment and EMRs.

- Manage the provision of technical functional support provided across the business to ensure HS2 LTD discharges its Nominated Undertaker responsibilities within budget and maintaining schedule.

- Own the management of the Route-wide Organisational Licences on-behalf of HS2 and requirements that come from this.

- Oversee and manage the provision of risk-based LOD 2 functional assurance activity in support of Delivery teams.

- Manage the technical interface and relationship with relevant key external stakeholders (e.g. Natural England, DEFRA, Forestry Commission and Woodland Trust). Ensuring efficacy of Service Level Agreement (SLA) with Natural England and the Forestry Commission is maintained to support Programme requirements.

- Lead technical responses to environmentally themed enquiries from the public and other stakeholders under Freedom of Information Act and Environmental Information Regulations. This includes Ministerial queries, Parliamentary questions, and media enquiries.

- Actively promote and embed Equality Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) in all work, and support and comply with all organisational initiatives, policies and procedures on EDI.

About You:

Skills

- Complex problem solving - enable technical expertise to assist complex problem solving, evaluate options and advise on technical solutions.

- Decision Quality - Ability to gather and synthesise information, identify options and analytical approaches to provide relevant information to suppliers, stakeholders and decision makers using key facts and data

- Technical Leadership – Confidently communicate discipline-specific technical ideas to stakeholders and colleagues, based on examples of application.

- Technical Leadership - Applies principles and methods that ensure effective information management, modelling and data security; understands the approaches and consequences to data creation, transformation and visualisation through guidance and advice from Subject Matter Experts.

- Technical Communication - Able to communicate some discipline-specific technical ideas to colleagues, based largely on examples of application.

- Influencing & Negotiation skills - including external and internal stakeholders

- Organisation & Planning skills – including working to deadline time, cost and quality requirements

Knowledge

- Knowledge of the UK context surrounding HS2 LTD, which includes having knowledge and understanding of the political and environmental implications which may/may have impacted HS2 LTD.

- Understanding of the Environmental and Sustainability Regulatory/ Legislative Framework relevant to HS2 LTD.

- Commercial awareness including understanding of cost delivery, schedule targets and the need to deliver an integrated solution that meets all functional requirements.

- Chartered Membership of an appropriate professional institution or the equivalent experience

Experience:

- Experience in leading multi-disciplinary standards and the environmental activity on complex major projects/ programmes within a complex infrastructure delivery programme including the management of multi-disciplinary teams.

- Experience of managing competing demands including engineering, technical and environmental with cost and schedule implications.

- Experience of project management gained across a range of environmental disciplines and processes

- Experience of managing/or supporting the management of large scale budgets within a design and construction environment.

- Experience of stakeholder management including external stakeholders such as government departments

The post-holder is expected to behave at all times in a manner consistent with the HS2 values of Safety, Leadership, Integrity and Respect

It is expected that you will actively promote and embed Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) in all your work and support and comply with all organisational initiatives, policies and procedures on EDI.

As HS2 Ltd do not hold a sponsorship license from the Home Office, we are not able to provide sponsorship to any applicant. Applicants must already have the Right to Work in the UK at the time of application and our process involves a Right to Work validation prior to the interview stage. Note, there are certain types of time-bound visas that we cannot accept.

Any offers made to applicants will be subject to satisfactory completion of pre-employment checks which include Nationality & Immigration Status, employment references, DBS, Financial and Education checks.

We ask for a variety of detail in your online application, however we perform the first assessment of suitability for a role based solely on the information in your CV. In a further development of our efforts to create a more diverse workforce, your CV will be anonymised and personal information will be removed during the first stage of the application review. This removes bias from the process and makes it even more important that you attach an updated word version of your CV for each new application ensuring you include evidence directly related to the criteria in the job advert.

Watch this video on how we remove bias in the recruitment process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JX2btaDOBK8

Any applications received after the closing date will not be considered and we reserve the right to close this vacancy early if a high volume of applications is received.