Policy Officer: Emergency Preparedness and Response

Details

Reference number

323803

Salary

£42,208

The salary for this role is £42,208 (London). For existing civil servants, the usual policy on level transfer and promotion will apply and is non-negotiable. If you apply for a role that requires a transfer of location, for example if you are transferring from London to a National location, your salary will be adjusted in accordance with our policy on transfer between HQ pay ranges.

A Civil Service Pension with an average employer contribution of 27%

Job grade

Senior Executive Officer

Contract type

Permanent

Type of role

Policy

Working pattern

Flexible working, Full-time, Job share, Part-time

Number of jobs available

1

Contents

Location
About the job
Benefits
Things you need to know
Apply and further information

Location

London

About the job

Job summary

Interested in supporting the government’s response to emergencies? The Central Response Coordination Unit is a high-profile team within the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities that will help the DLUHC to fulfil its role in responding to emergencies and other major events. This is a uniquely dynamic, fast paced and rewarding area of work. We are passionate about our role in protecting the public, and the local areas we represent. Wellbeing is also central to how we work – especially when dealing with challenging subject matter – and results in strong team bonds.
The CRCU is a newly established, permanent, cross-cutting team, resourced to deliver in two key areas for the department:

Preparing for emergencies: proactively preparing the department to respond to threats and hazards, putting in place departmental arrangements for responding to incidents, ready for activation; and
Emergency response: holding the key coordinating role across DLUHC when a response requires cross-departmental activity, managing the ‘GOLD’ structure and situational reporting when required.

Key priorities for CRCU for both these areas are below.
Building DLUHC-wide resilience (preparedness)
CRCU reports to the Director of Resilience and Recovery, but will form strategic links out across the department, particularly, where these are undeveloped.

CRCU will work with existing resilience teams to proactively scan the horizon for threats and hazards where the wider department hold an interest and in case of an incident, might be called upon.
CRCU will maintain an overview and engagement with individual risk playbooks, testing and exercising.
CRCU will engage with teams, including ALB sponsorship teams, that might hold relevant interests across DLUHC and build awareness of their responsibilities in time of crisis.

Coordinating the department’s response to emergencies (response)

CRCU will hold the key coordinating role across DLUHC, holding a bird’s-eye view, to identify opportunities to strengthen our intelligence, data, policy or protocol including the need for a policy decision.
CRCU will maintain a departmental emergency response plan, setting out departmental arrangements for responding to a range of crisis events, including concurrency and an exit strategy. CRCU will also maintain these documents, so they are ready for activation at short notice.
CRCU will support the SRO as the key interface with Ministers and the Executive Team by commissioning high quality briefing.
CRCU will hold overall ownership of the departmental SitRep (Situational Report) and the tracking of key strategic actions and the management and secretariat of the key cross-cutting meetings.

Job description

This SEO role will play a vital part in supporting CRCU to action its longer-term priorities as outlined above.
You will lead on the development of a programme of training and exercising for resilience-focused staff across DLUHC, to ensure all relevant teams are well-prepared heading into future emergency response scenarios
You will work closely with the People, Capability and Change (PC&C) Directorate to ensure DLUHC has appropriate emergency staffing plans in place
You will support CRCU in an emergency response by servicing the GOLD Coordination Group to oversee the strategic direction of the response, build situational awareness, and provide briefing for senior officials and ministers.
You will also help to influence CRCU’s longer-term work on preparedness and response, supporting the team to develop ‘business as usual’ structures.

Person specification

Essential:

Excellent organisational skills and the ability to meet strict deadlines.
The ability to work with a wide range of stakeholders across the department, building strong relationships to allow joint delivery.
The ability to demonstrate inclusive leadership and engage a team to deliver improved outcomes and seek new ways of working.
The ability to communicate complex information succinctly, clearly and with insight.

Desirable:

Experience of working in a coordination or resilience role.
Experience of engaging with data and analysis work.

We particularly welcome candidates from an ethnic minority background and other underrepresented groups to apply, as we work to continually improve our ability to represent the places and communities we support through our work.

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £42,208, Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities contributes £11,400 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

Learning and development tailored to your role
An environment with flexible working options
A culture encouraging inclusion and diversity
A Civil Service pension with an average employer contribution of 27%

Things you need to know

Selection process details

We are for everyone
At DLUHC we value diversity and inclusion and actively encourage and welcome applications from everyone, including those that are underrepresented in our workforce. We promote equality of opportunity in all aspects of employment and a working environment free from discrimination, harassment, bullying and victimisation.
We would strongly recommend that applicants get in touch with the vacancy manager to find out more information about this role.
We are for everyone
DLUHC want to bring in a diverse workforce at all levels.
Our application system is designed to remove as much bias as possible from the recruitment system – this means that a hiring manager does not know your name, your details, see your whole application in one go (or have your CV at review stage unless stated otherwise).
At application stage you will be asked to upload a CV document. Unless stated otherwise in the advert, your CV will not form part of the assessment but will be used for information purposes and only shared with the panel at interview stage.
Your answers are randomised and chunked up. This means that each assessor views sets of responses to questions for example all candidates’ responses to ‘Seeing the Big Picture’ rather than seeing a candidate’s full application. The science behind this is that recruitment can be subject to ordering and fatigue effects and we want to reduce this as much as possible.
Most of our campaigns utilise multiple assessors and so it is possible that each of your answers would be viewed by different assessors.
When writing your application, remember:

The assessor won’t be reading your answers sequentially.
Do not assume that the same assessors will have read all of your answers.
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