Job description

We at Allen & York are incredibly excited to be partnering with Water Resources East to support recruitment of this very important role.
Stakeholder Lead - nature recovery and integrated water resources planning

Permanent
Location: Home-based, with regular travel to sites in the east of England and London
Salary: up to £60k (depending on experience)
Full time, 37 hours per week (flexible and part-time working possible)
Attractive benefits package: 26 days annual leave increasing up to 30 days, bonus scheme, pension scheme, health and wellbeing benefits

The Opportunity
Water Resources East (WRE) is looking for an energetic, experienced and confident stakeholder lead, with a passion and interest in caring for the natural world around us. The successful candidate will support WRE's Technical Director and technical team to plan and deliver a programme of stakeholder engagement to consider objectives, priorities, options and trade-offs in bringing river systems and waterbodies across the Eastern England back to health. In this role you will work closely with regulators, water companies, farming, energy and environmental groups, internal drainage boards, catchment partnerships and leading consultancies amongst others.
Specifically, you will help drive forward a programme of catchment and sub-catchment scale Environmental Destination investigations - a key element of the water sector's Water Industry National Environment Programme (WINEP) for the 2025 - 2030 period. The need for these detailed investigations is described within WRE's Regional Water Resources Plan for Eastern England published in December 2023, and the results will heavily influence the next iteration of WRE's Regional Plan. The successful candidate will lead the engagement process so that the investigations gather multi-sector input, and ensure plans and strategies emerge that balance sector requirements with the need to protect and restore the environment.
This role represents a very exciting opportunity to shape long-term plans, investment and collaborative action that cuts across sectors and scales in securing improvements to the water environment. WRE's board has endorsed the most ambitious long-term outcomes for the environment across the Eastern region, and these investigations will explore how these ambitions can be fulfilled in practice.

The Role:
Direct day-to-day leadership of a stakeholder engagement programme that successfully delivers the Environmental Destination (ED) investigations will form the majority of this person's time:

• Promoting and facilitating multi-sector involvement at all stages? of the programme - improving multi-sector representation, and gaining buy-in to work together to address common challenges
• Building trust between all parties involved in the programme to support the development of collaborative solutions and reach consensus around environmental aims.
• Creating an engagement programme that leads to shared decision-making and prioritisation of environmental improvements and investment within catchments.
• Bridging the gap between technical work and collaborative decision-making? - working within the technical and programme management team, the person will need to develop a good level of understanding of the technical concepts and goals of the programme and develop enough knowledge to be able to work with and gain trust from people across different sectors.

This person will also:

• Act as WRE's lead point of contact with agricultural sector representatives (principally the National Farmers Union (NFU), Country Land Business Association (CLA), Water for Food Group (WfFG) and existing and new Water Abstractor Groups (WAGs)) and the relevant teams within the Environment Agency and Natural England.
• Support WfFG with development of a WAG toolkit - setting out how groups of abstractors can work together, and with regional groups like WRE, to understand their water needs and their role in finding solutions to changing water availability.
• Support Local Resource Option (LRO) screening studies - led by the EA - taking a lead role in specific tasks around stakeholder mapping and engagement.
• Run WRE's Agriculture Forum with key work in 2024/25 to develop a framework for integrating agriculture into WRE's regional planning approach (working with WRE's Technical Director, WfFG and existing WAGs).

• Support the team in the day to day running of the 'virtual' office, getting involved in all aspects of the small but busy team's activities.

Water Resources East is an Equal Opportunity Employer

For more information regarding this opportunity please contact Michelle: mluck@allen-york.com

About us: Allen & York have been matching purposeful people with purpose-led organisations for 30 years. We partner with our clients and candidates on roles that build an understanding of climate change, promote sustainability and create inclusive and responsible organisations, working towards a sustainable world for us all. Committed to inclusiveness in the workplace, we aim to increase diversity across all areas and therefore welcome applications from all qualified candidates, regardless of their ethnicity, race, gender, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, age, or whether or not they have a disability. Let's help build a better world, together.