Portfolio and Business Manager

The Environment Agency is fully committed to having an inclusive workforce to reflect the communities we serve. We don't just talk about diversity; we seek it, embrace it, and live it, for the benefit of our staff, our communities, and our environment.

This is an exciting and challenging role which sits at the heart of the delivery of planning, growth and infrastructure. It’s a new role and new team, reflecting the complexity of our Spending Review settlement and the importance of ensuring we deliver effectively with this funding.

In this Portfolio and Business Manager role you’ll be instrumental in providing direction to the leadership team with their ongoing priorities, delivery, and ongoing monitoring and evaluation of outputs, and in supporting the Director for Nature and Place in her role as Senior Responsible Officer for this funding.

You’ll lead in creating the relevant portfolio and team business plans, and work across the organisation to understand and track how benefits are realised for growth across the business. While technical knowledge of planning policy is not essential to be successful in this role, it may be beneficial, alongside a genuine enthusiasm for helping the organisation deliver the government’s growth mission.

The role is varied and there will be a need to assimilate new information quickly, working with a variety of senior leaders across the Environment Agency and Defra, and you’ll need to be comfortable working in a busy and often reactive environment.

You’ll oversee both existing and new functions, including finance, risk management, evaluation, and benefits realisation. You’ll need to be able to set up a new team, quickly bringing together the experience and ideas of existing team members with constructive challenge for how we could do things better, and be enthusiastic in developing your team.

You’ll join our Planning and Place team. We’re part of the Environment and Business (E&B) Directorate. We sit alongside four other team managers. We are committed to delivering sustainable growth while protecting and enhancing the environment.

We're a welcoming, inclusive, supportive and fun team, based across the full breadth of the country. We work collaboratively across our planning teams, and with operational colleagues across the country to deliver our planning service.

• Oversee the management and delivery of our SR settlement. This will include not just monitoring and understanding our forecasting but being able to set a clear narrative explaining how we’re delivering.
• Set up, lead and develop a high‑performing team, ensuring a motivated workforce that delivers organisational aims.
• Lead on the development of our team business plans and resource management to ensure that goals are delivered to required standards and budget, with continued monitoring and evaluation of what we achieve.
• Develop our approach to risk management, ensuring that we have the right mitigations in place across all delivery, and escalates appropriately.
• Develop our approach to benefits realisation, setting us up to not just track what activities we carry out, but also develop a proper understanding of what they achieve, and their effectiveness at supporting the delivery of sustainable growth.