Resilience and Emergency Planning Manager

What will you be doing?

Do you have a passion for partnership working? Would you like to help transform the capability of local authorities to respond effectively and consistently to incidents and emergencies?

What do reservoir failures, Covid-19, high rise building fires, and national power outages have in common? Well, all of them require Local Resilience Forum partners to work together to prepare for, respond to, and support communities to recover from these and many other incidents – and you could play a significant role in making this happen.

KCC’s Resilience & Emergency Planning Service, in partnership with Kent Police, Kent Fire & Rescue Service, and the other Category 1 responding agencies in the Kent & Medway Resilience Forum (KMRF) resource and support the Kent Resilience Team. This multi-agency team support KMRF partners to deliver work that makes Kent & Medway more resilient.

We are looking for someone with proven experience of working in a public sector / emergency planning environment in order to swiftly begin to drive this exciting and challenging work. As one of the managers in the KRT, you will lead one of the four main workstreams (risk, plans & capabilities, training & exercising, lessons identified / learned). This will require you to have leadership capabilities to deliver work in partnership with the wider resilience forum.

You will be confident navigating complex and high-risk statutory, legislative and governance frameworks. You will be used to working closely with senior colleagues across multiple services, understanding how decisions in one area impact others, and shaping work so it aligns with the statutory duties of KCC and wider partners.

The KRT (KCC) Manager will lead and coordinate workstreams that operate across the whole resilience forum. You will provide clear direction and ensure that work progresses in a timely manner. A strong understanding of emergency planning legislation, relevant qualifications, and / or extensive experience in the resilience sector is essential.

Experience working in a political environment is important. You will prepare, write and shape formal reports, presentations and papers for a variety of audiences, including KMRF governance boards, working groups, training courses, and exercises. You may also need to present to internal meetings of individual partners. Conversations will often be challenging, and there is a need to build consensus from an initial position of competing requirements.

Given the countywide nature of the role, travel to sites across Kent will be required, engaging directly with communities, stakeholders, and partners to ensure that planning is grounded in operational reality and local context of the needs of partners and communities.

You will also be comfortable with taking the lead at operational and tactical levels of incident response as part of the KCC Duty Emergency Planning Officer and KRT On Call Officer cohorts. You will be able to take appropriate, timely multi-agency decisions based on the information available to you at the time, to effectively prioritise tasks, and to confidently respond on behalf of KCC.

We are seeking someone who is able to drive change in complex areas, bring clarity and structure to ambiguous situations, and build strong relationships across the organisation to support a whole-Council approach to strategic delivery while taking a hands-on approach to tackling legal and repetitional risks.

You will have day-to-day line management and supervisory responsibilities for KRT / KCC staff. Whilst you and the rest of Kent Resilience Team will be based at Kent Fire & Rescue HQ in Tovil, Maidstone, you will be able to take advantage of a hybrid working policy (both home and office working, according to business needs). There is a requirement to be in the office twice a week.

You will also be closely linked to the wider KCC Resilience & Emergency Planning Service based at the County Emergency Centre on the County Hall campus in Maidstone. This gives you access to colleagues with specialist knowledge of the local authority landscape.

Application

As part of your application, you will need to outline all your relevant experience in the ‘Reason for Applying’ section of your online application form. We will use this section as part of the shortlisting process, so make sure you have evidenced how you meet the various requirements in the job description and person specification.

If you are shortlisted, we will ask you to deliver a presentation at your interview – we will confirm the subject of the presentation ahead of your interview date.

Main duties and responsibilities:

1. Participate effectively in KCC Infrastructure division Extended Leadership Team and other leadership forums, including providing specialist guidance and advice to internal services and influencing decision making and building customer relationships across KCC.

1. Co-lead with the KRT partners the development and delivery of the KMRF Business Plan, ensuring compliance with all relevant legislation, regulations, and guidance ensuring changes in legislation and regulations are interpreted and implemented

1. Represent the KRT at local, regional, and national multi-agency / stakeholder meetings, leading / chairing working groups, providing KRF opinions and tactical advice to influence the cross-directorate and multi-agency decision making on behalf of KCC.

1. Lead and develop the provision of specialist, clear, consistent professional advice and guidance regarding KMRF workstreams, by interpreting policy / procedures and applying best practice to solve complex resilience queries for a wide range of customers across all KMRF partner organisations.

1. Lead, develop and build strong customer relationships with multi-agency groups and partners, influencing decision makers through the understanding of how resilience issues may impact their organisation.

1. Manage and lead workstreams, projects, and initiatives within the Kent Resilience Team to meet multi-agency organisational aims and objectives ensuring the commissioning of expertise of other functions within the multi-agency organisations.

1. Manage and ensure oversight of project portfolios from concept to handover, which will include the setting of project plans, finance, procurement, communicating progress to the Head of the Kent Resilience Team, KMRF governance boards, and the KCC Head of Resilience and Emergency Planning to ensure the mitigation of risks to the population of Kent & Medway.

1. Lead and manage a team of professionally qualified staff, and those working towards qualification, developing and motivating them through day-to-day support and supervision.

1. Facilitate multi-agency debriefs to identify and learn lessons from responses, training, and exercises, to improve ways of working in the future.

1. Contribute to monitoring of budgets for the KRT as part of the KRT Management Team, ensuring that cost retrieval and other financial targets are achieved, and resources are used appropriately with consistent appraisal methods for expenditure.

1. Stimulate an environment for innovation, with opportunities to plan new interventions that will drive innovation, proactively embracing new ways of working. Continuously review current ways of working to identify improvements.

1. Participate in the KMRF’s and KCC’s response to incidents / emergencies, including contributing to command and control meetings, coordinating resources, and liaising with colleagues in KCC and wider KRF partner organisations (both in hours and out-of-hours), when required.
   
2. Support the development and delivery of multi-agency command training to KCC and wider KMRF partner agencies.

This post is subject to a Basic Disclosure Application to the Disclosure and Barring Service.

This post is considered by KCC to be a customer-facing position. The Council therefore has a statutory duty under Part 7 of the Immigration Act (2016) to ensure that post holders have a command of spoken English/Welsh sufficient for the effective performance of the job requirements. The appropriate standards are set out in the Job Description/Person Specification.

About you

If you have any questions about this role, please contact Andy Jeffery (andy.jeffery@kent.gov.uk), Head of Resilience & Emergency Planning, who will line manage this role.

About us

Work that works for you and us - let's talk flexibility!

KCC is committed to building a workforce which reflects the diversity of the county's working residents, encouraging applications from people of all ages, abilities, genders, sexual orientations, ethnic backgrounds, faiths and those with caring responsibilities, and aspires to create an inclusive workplace where everyone can be themselves at work.

Please note - if you are interested, please apply soon as possible as the closing date for this advert may be earlier than stated should a number of suitably qualified candidates apply.