Employer: Home Office

Role: SCS1 Deputy Director, Chief Portfolio Officer

Salary Band: up to £117,000 for external candidates plus 27% pension contribution

Location: Any Home Office location (including London, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Birmingham, Belfast, Peterborough, Edinburgh, Solihull and Stoke-on-Trent), regular travel expected to London

The Home Office is one of the original great Departments of State and its role is fundamentally important: to keep Britain’s streets safe and its borders secure. With a budget of £14.7bn, the Home Office leads on immigration and passports, drugs and crime policy, counter-extremism and counterterrorism and works to ensure visible, responsive, and accountable policing in the UK. The Home Office Projects Portfolio currently has over 34 programmes, with an average annual spend in 2024 of £1.8 billion. These programmes are key to enabling the HO to deliver on its four strategic objectives. Within these 34 programmes, 22 currently sit within the Government Major Projects Portfolio (GMPP), making the Home Office the second largest GMPP portfolio.

As an experienced portfolio and project professional, you will provide visible leadership to the project delivery profession deputising at InvestCo and other departmental boards. Collaborating with colleagues across the department and third-party consultants, you will influence work to refine and implement the organisational design and revised operating model for the Home Office Portfolio. You will champion and improve project delivery standards across all programmes, driving up compliance through the development of guidance materials, toolkits, and techniques. This role will be central in driving the maturity roadmap and management of the Home Office Portfolio and its governance through improvement plans, building a robust assurance capability at a departmental level.  Importantly, you will promote an energised culture, focused on collaborative working in the interests of the organisation and the portfolio.

With a proven track record in leadership and delivery, you will bring the ability to build confidence and trust across a large stakeholder base, including senior project delivery leaders and teams across the organisation. You will have delivered large, complex projects and programmes, preferably within government in a portfolio capacity. As a senior level collaborator with strong influencing skills, you will be someone who can quickly and effectively build great networks with senior external stakeholders, across organisational boundaries.  Above all, you will care about making a difference: transforming how we build a Portfolio function for both the present and the future, over what will be a highly important and exciting time for our country.  A recognised project or programme delivery qualification at degree level or equivalent, such as the PLP, Prince 2 Certification or other recognised accreditation, will be considered essential.

For a confidential discussion about the role, contact our advising consultants at GatenbySanderson:

Orla.Brennan@gatenbysanderson.com
Michelle.Atkinson@gatenbysanderson.com

Applications can be submitted by clicking on the Apply On Website button and must be received by 23:55 on Sunday 2^nd March 2025.