Procurement Manager

Make a real impact in West Sussex.

Are you a good influencer with drive to make positive changes?

Looking for the next step in your Procurement career?

If so, this could be your next role

About the Job

West Sussex County Council is seeking a Procurement Manager to oversee procurement activities, supporting the delivery of services to our residents and ensure a better quality of life.

Salary: £49,817 to £53,051per annum.

Working Pattern: Full-time (37 hours per week) and part-time hours considered.

Contract Length: Permanent.

Location: County Hall, Chichester, with hybrid working options.

As Procurement Manager, you will lead the end‑to‑end delivery of low‑value procurement projects across our three core category areas People, Place, and Resources, supporting a combined annual external spend of approximately £600million p/a.

You will assist stakeholders throughout the entire procurement cycle, including managing tenders via e-Sourcing portals, ensuring the delivery of value for money outcomes through effective and compliant procurement procedures.

You’ll manage a dedicated Buying Desk team within Operations & Analytics, ensuring compliant, efficient and value‑driven procurement activity. From sourcing competitive quotes to supporting tender evaluations, you’ll champion best practice procurement, governance, compliance and commercial rigour across the organisation.

Your work will directly support the Council’s priorities around social value, sustainability, climate action, and customer‑centred commissioning.

Team structure/reporting lines;

• Head of Procurement & Contract Management
• Operations and Analytics Team Manager
• Procurement Manager (delivery/implementation lead of the Buying Desk and competitive tenders)
• Procurement Officer (supporting delivery/implementation of the Buying Desk and competitive tenders)

Experience and Skills

Key Skills:

• Communicates clearly and is capable of adapting communication style to suit the audience.
• Demonstrates a range of skills in negotiation and when to apply these.
• Good stakeholder management skills, demonstrating ability to engage, influence and advise stakeholders at multiple levels whilst ensuring compliance with procurement processes and governance requirements.
• Has the capacity to manage multiple small and medium sized projects and tenders, effectively managing the procurement process.
• Ability to conduct analysis and verify procurement, commercial and evaluation data to provide concise insights and support accurate decision making.
• Understands procurement governance, compliance requirements and process improvement, with the ability to apply these consistently across procurement activity.
• Demonstrates the ability to identify opportunities for improvement whilst maintaining compliance with legislative requirements.
• Strong interpersonal and leadership skills to effectively manage, support, develop and provide guidance to the Buying Desk team, aligned to service expectations, applicable standards and best practice procurement processes.

Qualifications and/or experience:

• Knowledge and experience of public procurement legislation, including the Procurement Act 2023 (PA23) and Health and Care Act 2022 Provider Selection Regime (PSR), including below-threshold procurement requirements, Government procurement frameworks and competitive tendering routes.
• Experience of delivering sourcing strategies, compliant procurement exercises, and supporting procurement governance requirements.
• Knowledge and experience of using eTendering and procurement systems to manage sourcing exercises, procurement records, evaluation activity, governance requirements and contract management activity.
• Has a good understanding of procurement, commercial and governance risks and can demonstrate application of this within procurement decision making.
• Demonstrable experience of delivering total cost of ownership savings.
• Developing project leadership and management capabilities and experience, can demonstrate capacity to manage multiple small and medium sized projects.
• Understanding of procurement evaluation methodologies, supplier assessment, contract award processes and procurement compliance requirements.
• Working towards MCIPS or willingness to study for CIPS.

For more information on the Key Skills as well as the Qualifications and/or experience required, please refer to the Job Description attached.

Working for us

As well as adding real value to our service users and our communities, as an employer we recognise our employees are central in being able to achieve this. To recognise this we want to help support your development and provide a great place to work ensuring you can fulfil your full potential, have access to a range of benefits including:

• an excellent local government pension scheme
• generous holiday entitlement of 30 days (plus opportunity to buy additional leave)
• a range of flexible working options, depending on your job role
• maternity, paternity, dependency and adoption leave
• volunteering opportunities
• training and development opportunities, including coaching and mentoring
• a range of discounts giving our staff access to hundreds of offers; groceries, travel, cinema tickets, days out, leisure activities, high street retailers and the opportunity to save over £1,000 a year through our West Sussex Choices benefits platform (see our Staff discounts pageif you are a business looking to offer a discount)
• health and wellbeing benefits including access to our Employee Assistance Programme, Mental Health First Aiders and Voluntary Health Cash Plans

For a full list this can be found at our Rewards and Benefits page.

Further information

The reference number for this role is CRS01133.

For an informal conversation or for further information please contact Ben Chivers-Gibbs at Ben.Chivers-Gibbs@westsussex.gov.uk

For ant issues or queries regarding your application please contact hrrecruitment@westsussex.gov.uk.

Internal candidates wishing to apply for this role will be considered for a secondment position. Please can you therefore discuss and agree this with your manager before applying for this position.

To apply, please follow the links below to upload your CV and Cover Letter. In your cover letter please outline your motivations for applying and explaining the skills and experience you can bring to the role (please refer to the key skills) ensuring that any gaps in employment are covered in your CV. Please ensure you have saved the job description attached to the main advert on our website as, once the job has closed, you may not have the opportunity to download again.

We are committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children, young people and vulnerable adults. This post is subject to 3 years referencing and a health check.

Equity, inclusion and accessibility is very important to West Sussex County Council. We welcome and encourage applications from everyone, as this helps us build a diverse and talented workforce, that reflects the communities we serve. We ensure our approach to recruitment is flexible and supportive to enable all applicants to be at their best and to ensure they have the best possible chance of success.

We operate a guaranteed interview scheme for applicants that have a disability, are a veteran or are a care leaver. More information can be found on our application helppage.

Note for Recruitment Agencies: We prefer to hire people directly, but we do have a supplier list for when we need a helping hand. We'll be in touch directly if we need you!