Assistant Director, Development Management & Environment

Every borough with Newham's scale of ambition needs a growth story. Fewer have to run the regulatory system that decides whether that story actually gets built, safely, fairly, and in a way residents can trust. That's this role.

Newham's development pipeline is one of the largest and most complex in London: a Local Plan targeting more than 50,000 new homes by 2038, employment land protected for the borough's growing data and green economy, major schemes moving through Canning Town, Custom House, Stratford and the Royal Docks, and a Council-wide commitment to zero-carbon development. Almost none of that reaches a resident's doorstep without passing through Development Management, building control, planning enforcement and environmental regulation first. When those services work well, growth is enabled at pace and standards hold. When they don't, schemes stall, appeals mount, and confidence in the planning system erodes, and in a borough with this volume and profile of applications, there's very little room for that to happen unnoticed.

You'll set the strategic direction for how Newham assesses, approves, regulates and enforces development, and you'll be the person Members and senior officers call on when a decision is contested, an appeal is live, or a building safety issue needs an authoritative, defensible answer. That means holding the line on regulatory integrity while staying genuinely useful to a Council that needs its planning authority to be a partner in delivery, not an obstacle to it, a balance that gets harder, not easier, as the volume and profile of development grows.

Planning enforcement, environmental health and building control all report into the coherence you set, and the credibility of Newham's planning and regulatory function, with developers, government and the public alike, rests largely on how well you make those pieces work as one system rather than four.

This role suits someone who has run development management or a comparable regulatory service at real scale, who can defend a difficult decision at appeal or in front of committee without losing the room, and who understands that viability, market pressure and regulatory rigour aren't opposing forces so much as things that have to be managed together, case by case. If you've spent a career frustrated by planning services that either wave everything through or grind everything to a halt, this is the chance to build one that does neither, in a borough where the stakes of getting that balance wrong are unusually visible.

Full details of the role and person specification are set out in the job description. If this is the scale of challenge you're looking for, we'd like to hear from you.

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