6411 - Principal Officer Strategic Solutions (for Development and Nature) in London

Natural England are yet to finalise the details of the 2025 Pay Review. This will be backdated to July 2025, and this could involve a review of our current terms and conditions alongside increases to the advertised pay ranges. If there are any changes to what has been advertised the vacancy manager will be able to provide further details ahead of any offers being accepted.

Join us in shaping a future where nature and people thrive. Whether you’re drawn to hands‑on conservation or playing a vital part behind the scenes, your work at Natural England will support lasting benefits for the environment and society.

Natural England is the Government’s adviser for the natural environment and the Nature regulator with a wide range of statutory duties and powers. We provide the evidence, expertise and advice to recover Nature and shape better places for people to live. We do this working through and with others.

Strategic Outcomes for Nature

• Recovering Nature – Increased scale and quality of places where nature thrives.
• Building Better Places – Greener homes and infrastructure create healthier, more investable places, recognising we live better where nature thrives around us.
• Improving Health and Wellbeing – Build nature into everyday life so people can support, access and benefit from nature, wherever they live.
• Delivering Security through Nature – Nature helps us adapt to the threats of a changing climate and improves our national security, supporting more resilient food production, healthy soils, clean and plentiful water and clean air.

Do you want to make a real difference, working in a high priority area, securing significant environmental gains at a national level? These roles are a rare opportunity to play a part in bringing about systematic change to how the planning system works for nature and growth.

We are seeking ambitious individuals with great communication and organisational skills to join our highly performing, supportive and friendly teams across Natural England’s Sustainable Development work. Natural England’s new Strategy includes making a shift from isolated interventions to nature recovery happening at scale, ensuring our efforts deliver lasting improvement across whole landscapes and seascapes. As part of this, our Sustainable Development work is helping build better places, ensuring nature is designed into development and investment plans from the outset. We do this by advising and influencing Government Departments, regulators, the Office of Environmental Protection, industry, NE colleagues and others on how the land use and marine planning systems can protect and restore nature.

In these roles you’ll be working on the most important development impacts of our age. These are mostly cumulative, indirect impacts such as air pollution, water pollution, water shortage, habitat fragmentation, disturbance of sensitive species, and obstruction of natural coastal change. These are the impact types which present most risk to development and delivery of economic growth because they are difficult to resolve at site scale. They require strategic solutions which will address impacts at many sites and deliver gains for nature on a large scale. We’re looking for win‑wins which will help society to meet its broad objectives, including the boosting of nature’s recovery.

The team is currently engaged in a range of strategic solutions for offshore energy generation, air pollution, recreational disturbance and water resources. The breadth of this work will grow, as we aim to expand radically the range of strategic solutions available to secure positive outcomes from development.

Key Tasks/Principal Accountabilities

• Shape and deliver legislative planning, policy reforms and infrastructure projects to ensure that they are customer focused, digitally enabled and sustainable in the long term with a shift to nature’s recovery at scale delivered through the planning system.
• Developing innovative Strategic Solutions to high‑risk planning casework with widespread or large‑scale environmental implications.
• Provide positive leadership of your work area ensuring and articulating a clear vision and work programme.
• Develop and oversee delivery of your work programme, working collaboratively across the organisation providing strong internal leadership and integration across national teams and Operations.
• Provide expert advice to colleagues to help inform and shape new approaches and decision‑making within and outside the organisation.
• Ensure a positive and collaborative working relationship with key contacts in Government departments etc.
• Provide expert advice to Government on your area of responsibility to shape key policy development/strategy/legislative initiatives.