Team Senior Lawyer – Planning

Staffordshire County Council is a modern, progressive, and forward-thinking authority that is ambitious and empowers its employees to be courageous and innovative in their approach.

Staffordshire Legal Services is a large in-house corporate legal team, offering a significant breadth of experience and expertise. We support and retain our lawyers, trainees and support staff by offering a wide variety of work, an extensive benefits package and offering training and mentoring to aide progression. We want everyone to enjoy their work, feel challenged and appreciated for what they do, and positively contribute to making a difference to the lives of the people of Staffordshire.

People are often unaware that Legal Services support the Council to fulfil every function when delivering its agenda and priorities, in addition to the Staffordshire pension fund, and a wide range of external clients. This keeps the work interesting, challenging and often high value and high profile.

We genuinely recognise the benefit of achieving the right work life balance and our extensive package of benefits support this. Lots of organisations offer this however our staff survey reliably informs us that our work ethos truly delivers this. Our package includes a generous holiday entitlement, increasing significantly with service, and an additional annual leave purchase scheme. Flexible and term time only working, agile working, employee travel and entertainment discounts, a local government pension scheme, optional car lease scheme and a staff parking discount scheme.

We also offer family friendly polices such as maternity, adoption, paternity, and parental leave.

These will include delivering support in relation to Planning matters, as follows:

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• Advising on County Planning matters including applications received and work generated and planning enforcement.
• Negotiating complex planning obligations on behalf of highway and education clients.
• Giving advice in relation to a full range of often complex Local Authority statutory Planning functions
• Managing client files in accordance with Lexcel requirements and supervising other members of the team.

We are looking for you to be a qualified Chartered Legal Executive (with practice/advocacy rights), Solicitor or Barrister with:

• A comprehensive understanding of Planning law
• An in-depth understanding of the work carried out within the public sector, although previous local government experience is not essential.
• An ability to clearly, confidently and effectively communicate.
• Meticulous attention to detail.
• Effective time management, prioritisation skills and an ability to work under the demands of competing pressures.
• An ability to delegate work in order to generate capacity.

We're happy to talk flexible working'.

If you are unsure if your skills and experience are suitable for this role, or for an informal chat, please contact Imran Razaq, Deputy Legal Services Manager at Imra or John Rowe, Principal Lawyer at jo

Interviews will take place during week commencing 9 February 2026.

We anonymise applications during shortlisting to ensure only relevant information is considered. Please complete your application fully, especially the supporting statement, to highlight what you'll bring to the role.

The core of who we are as an organisation. Just like we all have personal values that shape our thoughts and behaviour, organisational values drive how we think and act collectively.

Our values were created and shaped by colleague feedback and national best practice and they sit at the heart of People Strategy:

We have a real sense of community spirit that brings our people together. This feeling of belonging means we are all connected to what we do and take pride in the difference we make every day for Staffordshire people. We are ambitious and our sights are set firmly on a better future.

We look forward and race ahead - that goes for your career too.

We recognise that it is our employees that are central to everything we do. We aim to create a supportive…