Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Cardiff, Salford, Birmingham, Darlington. Occasional travel to London and across DESNZ estate will be required.

About the Role

The Energy Affordability Directorate was formed in 2022 in order to lead Governments response to an unprecedented surge in energy prices. Since its formation, it has overseen delivery of over £40 billion of energy price support across the whole of the UK, funding around half of household bills last winter and providing support to businesses and charities through a challenging period. While prices are now falling, they remain high and households and businesses continue to face significant challenges. 

What will the successful candidate being doing? 

As Director, you will be responsible for leading the team in developing a refreshed approach to ensuring the market works for businesses and consumers. You will take overall responsibility for policy on retail markets, consumer affordability and policy costs on bills, acting as the departmental lead for our relationship with Ofgem, as well as continued delivery of the suite of policy schemes launched in 2022, ensuring successful closure and strong delivery leadership for the remainder of the schemes. This will include line management of 3 SCS1s.

Your responsibilities will include-

• Providing inclusive and inspiring leadership to a Directorate of around c. 130 staff split across 4 Deputy Director led teams with a mix of policy, delivery and analysis expertise. You will lead the Directorate through a period of change as the suite of price support schemes wind down and our approach to affordability and retail markets evolves, set the direction, empower staff and manage resources flexibly across your responsibilities, inspiring and empowering them to perform, providing continued opportunities for them to stretch and develop, and ensuring a fun and supportive atmosphere within the team.
• Ensuring effective delivery of the energy support schemes as SRO (including the Energy Price Guarantee, Alternative Fuel Payment, Energy Bills Relief Scheme and Energy Bill Discount Scheme), including effective delivery of closing stages of schemes, management of scheme budgets, and ensuring high quality management of financial reconciliation processes and fraud and error risks. 
• Leading the Departments work on retail energy market policy, including working with Ofgem on live issues relating to retail markets and developing and delivering policy on future facing issues and market reform.
• Lead the Departments sponsor relationship with Ofgem.
• Oversee all work on consumer affordability strategy including on structure of household and business bills, policy costs and levies, and work to rebalance costs in order to incentivise take-up of key technologies for the transition to net zero. 

Skills and Experience (Essential)

• Building and inspiring high-performing teams with a strong focus on delivery through periods of change and ambiguity;
• The ability to work effectively with external partners such as Ofgem, and across professional boundaries, building strong relationships and providing appropriate challenge; 
• Comfortable working in a programme management environment, managing financial risk and scrutiny; 
• The ability to link strategic insights and evidence to decisions on funding and regulation; and
• Commitment to driving forward transformation and change in the department including through Places for Growth and the departments values. 

We expect all our senior leaders to be

• Inspiring about our work and its future 
• Confident in our engagement with others 
• Empowering to allow our teams to deliver 

Alongside your salary of £97,000, Department for Energy Security & Net Zero contributes £28,100 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero offers a competitive mix of benefits including:

• A culture of flexible working, such as job sharing, homeworking and compressed hours.
• Automatic enrolment into the Civil Service Pension Scheme, with an average employer contribution of 27%.
• A minimum of 25 days of paid annual leave, increasing by 1 day per year up to a maximum of 30.
• An extensive range of learning & professional development opportunities, which all staff are actively encouraged to pursue.
• Access to a range of retail, travel and lifestyle employee discounts.

Office attendance

The Department operates a discretionary hybrid working policy, which provides for a combination of working hours from your place of work and from your home in the UK. The current expectation for staff is to attend the office or non-home based location for 40-60% of the time over the accounting period. Senior Civil Servant (SCS) staff are expected to aim for closer to 60% of the time at an office or non-home based location over the accounting period.

Further Information

Reasonable Adjustment

We are proud to be a disability confident leader and we welcome applications from disabled candidates and candidates with long-term conditions. 

Information about the Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) and some examples of adjustments that we offer to disabled candidates and candidates with long-term health conditions during our recruitment process can be found in our DESNZ Candidate Guidance. A DESNZ Plain Text Version of the guidance is also available. 

We encourage candidates to discuss their adjustment needs by emailing the job contact which can be found under the contact point for applicants section. 

If you are experiencing accessibility problems with any attachments on this advert, please contact the email address in the 'Contact point for applicants' section. 

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.

The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see the Civil Service People Plan (opens in a new window) and the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy (opens in a new window).

This vacancy is part of the Great Place to Work for Veterans (opens in a new window) initiative.

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Job contact :

• Name : SCS Recruitment Team
• Email : [email protected]

Recruitment team

• Email : [email protected]