Head of Landscape Recovery and Grant Innovation in London

The team leader will line manage a team of 14, including directly line managing 4. The team leader will be part of a peer group with 4 other Senior Leaders who support the leadership of the National Grants and Regulations team as a whole. The team will include 2 HEO/PB3 led sub-teams focused on leading Forestry Commission’s contributions to the Environmental Land Management Scheme “Landscape Recovery”. This part of NGR particularly focuses on supporting landscape scale partnerships in the first two years of the scheme, when they are developing their 20-year implementation plan. The team also supports the Area teams as they step in to support those schemes that move into Implementation.

This is an exciting area of work with high ambition in terms of delivering areas of woodland into management and new woodland creation, responding to opportunities for nature recovery and responding to climate change at a landscape scale. A key innovative feature of Landscape Recovery schemes involves balancing grant funding with sourcing of Green Finance to deliver the objectives, so the team leader will be a key advocate of how private green finance interacts with public grant funding.

The team also covers further grants sub-teams which have an important element of grant innovation within them. This includes Agroforestry, where grant support occurs through various Environmental Land Management Grants and where our advisers are driving a shift to integrate this new practice to support resilience and productivity within the farming sector, as part of challenging targets to support 10% of arable land into Agroforestry. It also includes a range of grants focused on innovation in tree nurseries – to invest to ensure more resilient range of species production, plus support for sector skills training and also capital grants for innovation in supporting woods into management.

We are looking to recruit someone with a passion for building new ways of working, highly self-motivated to drive change and improvement, with an excellent track record of managing teams to achieve high performance in a fast-paced environment. The post holder will work closely with many internal and external stakeholders and so the ability to work closely and collaboratively with others is essential; as is the ability to influence key decision makers to achieve favourable outcomes for the team and wider FC.

This NGR team leader will:

• Line-manage staff and work closely with other team leaders in NGR, to ensure team cohesion and a shared understanding of the corporate strategy.
• Work closely with Forestry Commission, Defra, Natural England, and Environment Agency leads to identify mechanisms that will drive forward the delivery of targets for Landscape Recovery, agroforestry and innovation grants.
• Ensure appropriate Subject Matter Expertise for the development of digital systems and associated support materials for delivering these grants.
• Ensure all work on Landscape Recovery and innovation is addressed in a manner which is timely, accurate, and collaborative across Defra and seek legal advice when appropriate.