Neighbourhoods Assistant Director

We're looking to appoint a Neighbourhoods Assistant Director to drive improvements and responsiveness across our most visible front-line services.

A message from Neil Shaw, Executive Director for Growth, Enterprise & Environment

 

Thank you for your interest in the role.  We’ve created the information on this microsite to tell you a bit more about Redcar & Cleveland, some detail about the role and what we see as the key priorities for the new Neighbourhood Services – Assistant Director.

Redcar and Cleveland is a key part of Teesside. With the River Tees and the coastline as part of our borders, we also back onto the North Yorkshire Moors National Park.  We have around 140,000 residents and we are home to Redcar, Guisborough, Loftus and Saltburn and a large rural hinterland across East Cleveland.

We’re an ambitious council – driving over £900m worth of investment and regeneration over the last few years.  We’re home to Teesworks down on the River Tees - Europe’s largest brownfield site. We have a strong and growing tourism economy with more than four million visitors each year, particularly around our seaside offer at Redcar and Saltburn.

The role sits within a directorate which has three Assistant Director roles.  Sitting alongside the Neighbourhoods Assistant Director are the Assistant Directors for Growth (focusing on Planning, Business Engagement, Regeneration and Health Protection) and Culture (focusing on tourism, libraries, museum and the council’s property portfolio).

A word or two from our Portfolio Holders

Two senior members cover the Neighbourhoods portfolio – Councillor Neil Bendelow and Councillor Carl Quartermain.  Neighbourhoods covers a diverse and demanding portfolio of services.  

It’s the part of the council that gets the most attention from our residents and our fellow elected members.  It includes:

  • Waste collection – we empty more than four million bins each year. We were one of the first North East councils to roll out a new food collection service this year and we have started construction on a new Energy Recovery Facility in the borough which – in a few years – will serve a number of North East authorities. 
  • Streetscene – which includes keeping all our parks and open spaces well maintained, street sweeping, weed spraying, picking up around 4,800 fly-tips each year and maintaining our cemeteries.
  • Highways – looking after 700km of road network, keeping over 32,000 drainage gulleys clear, responsibility for 350 highways structures and filling over 9,000 potholes each year.
  • Community safety – supporting our Community Safety Partnership, running the borough’s 200 CCTV cameras and parking enforcement.

About the recruitment for this role

So, there’s a lot going on and this is a demanding but rewarding role.  I’m keen that we focus on delivering in some priority areas given the breadth of the role.  

This will be an important focus within the recruitment process.  Our key priorities over the next couple of years are:

  • Maintaining and improving the quality of frontline services – this means our bread-and-butter waste collection, streetscene and highways functions are key and maintaining the quality of these services in a challenging budget environment is essential.
  • Seeking innovative and external funding bids – this means supporting an improvement particularly in our parks. I’d like to see development plans for our major parks partly supported by external funding bids.  I’d love to have some of our parks with more brightness and imagination that residents can be proud of.
  • Driving a ‘can do’ and responsive culture – responding more quickly and consistently to both our residents and councillors to let them know what’s going on and how problems are being resolved.  This is all about a leader who can be tenacious in driving the right culture across a diverse and sometimes challenging staff base.

If you are interested in the role I can tell you you’d be joining a great directorate management team, which is helpful and supportive and I want to create the right environment for you to thrive, deliver and succeed.

You will also lead a great team of people, and this video gives you a flavour of our workforce.

How you can find about more about the role and the services we deliver

You can see how we tell the tale of how our residents benefit from our services at This is Redcar and Cleveland | Redcar and Cleveland

You can find out more about the Job Description and Person Specification for this role in the 'related links' section of this page. 

You can also find out more about our Corporate and Strategic Plans in the 'related links' section of this page, too, where you can learn more about the council's priorities for Redcar and Cleveland.

If you’d like to have an informal confidential chat about the role please email me at neil.shaw@redcar-cleveland.gov.uk and we can set up a time for a chat and I can tell you more about the council and the role.  Good luck.