Group Finance Director

London or Birmingham

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.

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.

The Group Finance Director’s role is to provide strong stewardship over the assets and financials of HS2 and lead the HS2 Group Finance team providing financial oversight, control and direction to the HS2 project. This role is also responsible for the Insurance, and Estates and Facilities function.

• Developing and leading a strong Group Finance team (taking full accountability for their outputs) to provide strong stewardship to the HS2 organisation and support the various stages of the programme lifecycle.
• Defining and delivering the HS2 financial performance management framework and policies across HS2, including driving insightful management reporting, defining KPIs & models used and ensuring HS2’s ability to provide the right guidance on expected future performance to key stakeholders.
• Delivering annual multi-year business planning and budget setting processes (including Spending Reviews) and forecasts for capital and operating expenditure, ensuring that they are affordable, deliverable and aligned to schedule and the programme’s critical path activities.
• Developing, maintaining, reviewing and updating a strong internal control environment to ensure integrity and timeliness of period end and year end reporting.
• Driving the adoption of consistent reporting methodologies and financial processes, in conjunction with the Controls and Commercial teams.
• Embedding a cost focused culture to support the delivery of cost efficiencies.
• Managing relationships with key internal and external stakeholders, including but not limited to DfT, HMT, IPA, and internal & external auditors, ensuring HS2 consistently demonstrate transparency and focus on performance.
• Member of various internal decision-making panels.
• 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.

• Direction – define and prioritise objectives, analyse and assess data, define strategies and provide supporting rationales. Ability to direct both the direct team and engage with wider internal stakeholders in the delivery of key deliverables. To be a champion of effective financial controls.
• Problem solving - ability to interpret complex financial data and use it to support decisions and recommendations within the business. This includes the management and planning of multiple work streams and the competing demands of stakeholders.
• Decision making ability to gather and synthesise information, identify options and apply judgement based on logic, reason, and compliance with accounting standards (current IFRS and FReM understanding required). To make use of a variety of analytical approaches to provide relevant information to a range of stakeholders and decision makers using key facts and data.
• Influencing and negotiating skills - including internal and external stakeholders.
• Communication skills - communicate effectively with all levels within HS2 Ltd and DfT, adapting any…