Head of Service – Highways Delivery

Overview

In this role, you lead highways delivery for Lancashire, turning plans and investment into safe, high-quality network outcomes. You will manage a large, diverse team and a broad portfolio spanning capital works, maintenance, and operational delivery, including winter service and incident response. You’ll shape strategy, governance, and continuous improvement to deliver value for money and resilient services. This is an opportunity to influence the future of local highways and community wellbeing through collaborative, cross-functional leadership.

Pay / Benefits

• Competitive salary
• 26 days annual leave plus bank holidays
• Flexible working opportunities
• Health and wellbeing support
• Family-friendly policies
• Financial and travel benefits

Responsibilities

• Provide strategic leadership for highways delivery across Lancashire and translate plans into safe, high-quality outcomes
• Manage a large workforce and contractors, overseeing capital works, maintenance, winter service, and emergency response
• Act as Senior Responsible Officer for designated schemes and ensure strong financial control, safety, quality and sustainability
• Lead transformation and continuous improvement to create resilient, customer-focused services
• Collaborate with other Heads of Service, elected members and partners to align engineering standards, asset priorities and governance
• Drive performance across budgets, assets, programmes and supply chains
• Ensure compliance with highways operations, CDM and safety requirements
• Foster a culture of accountability and high professional standards while leading through change
• Build productive relationships across multi-disciplinary teams and external partners

Key requirements

• Significant experience delivering highways, infrastructure, maintenance, or similar complex operational services
• Proven leadership of large operational teams and ability to develop people and performance
• Strong budget ownership, financial decision-making and programme delivery experience
• Experience working with multi-disciplinary teams, contractors and supply chain partners
• Understanding of highways operations, maintenance, construction, statutory duties and safe, compliant delivery (CDM)
• Excellent communication and stakeholder-management skills with senior leaders and communities
• Health, safety and environmental leadership, plus quality and continuous improvement experience
• Knowledge of contract management and mixed-economy delivery models

• strong communication and influencing abilities
• stakeholder-management
• collaborative leadership style
• civil engineering or highways engineering expertise
• project and programme management for large-scale schemes
• budgeting and financial control for capital and revenue programmes

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