Public Health Principal

Team: Public Health - Choose You 

Job Family: Advising (M)- CBG12

Salary: £45,326 - £50,436 per annum

Hours:  37 hours per week

Location: You will be expected to attend a CBC office location as often as needed to carry out your role including Priory House or other locations within Bedford, Milton Keynes or Central Bedfordshire at least once per week.

Contract Type: Hybrid - Permanent

Closing Date: 30th November 2025

Interview Dates: 12th December 2025

About the role

Working on behalf of the Shared Public Health Service across Bedford Borough, Central Bedfordshire and Milton Keynes, the role of Public Health Principal – Quality & Strategy will be responsible for ensuring that our recently-launched integrated behaviour change service, Choose You delivers high quality outcomes for our residents.

Reporting to the Head of Service – Health Improvement, who retains overall leadership for the service, you will work closely with the Public Health Principal – Service Delivery, to lead and manage the Service's strategic direction. Your responsibilities will include monitoring performance, evaluating outcomes, and driving continuous improvement. This encompasses oversight of Smoke-Free Generation funded initiatives and the advancement of wider Tobacco Control activities. 

If you have a passion for evaluation, enhancing service outcomes, and collaborating with partners and service users, this is an excellent opportunity to use your skills and knowledge to shape and develop the service, to help our residents make healthy lifestyle changes.

You will manage a team of Practitioners to provide residents with integrated support to adopt healthier behaviours to help improve their wellbeing.

Key Responsibilities will include to:

• Improve outcomes / health & wellbeing of those engaging with Choose You.
• Provide leadership that delivers high quality services which will simplify and enhance residents' experience of behaviour change advice, guidance, and support, reducing the need for multiple referrals between services
• Ensure that the Service is effectively monitored and evaluated to identify impact, good practice, effective performance and areas for improvement.
• Set performance targets for Choose You for stop smoking, weight management and behaviour change.
• Address health inequalities across our 3 authorities by ensuring that Choose You offers high quality service access, good user experience and positive outcomes.
• Provide Public Health leadership, collaborating with other Public Health Principals, senior council managers and commissioned services.
• Provide strategic oversight of outreach and engagement objectives and plans, to increase awareness of Choose You and access to the service.
• To effectively identify, engage and build relationships with wider stakeholders (e.g. Primary Care, voluntary sector and ICB) to support the ongoing development and delivery of services.
• To increase well-being, training, development and engagement of the workforce to support the delivery of a high quality, effective service.
• Have strategic oversight of training for the Choose You Team, with responsibility for commissioning external training providers where necessary.
• Manage the development and delivery of the Smoke-free Generation strategy/and action plan, including setting strategic objectives and the direction of that work.
• Hold required budget management responsibilities including Smoke-free Generation and engagement budgets.
• Provide line management of the Tobacco Control Practitioner and the Training & Engagement Practitioner.

The responsibilities listed above are not intended to be exhaustive. The role holder is expected to accept reasonable alterations and additional tasks of a similar level that may be necessary.

Qualifications and Experience

We want to hear from you if you are committed to enhancing and improving the quality-of-service delivery and the well-being of staff, partners and service users and have:

• A relevant degree (e.g. public health/nutrition/dietetics/sports science) or equivalent knowledge.
• At least 2 years of leadership experience in public health or a related organisation (e.g. local authority).
• Previous strategic experience, especially supporting service delivery.
• Strategic experience in shaping and developing weight management or stop smoking lifestyle change support.
• Experience of working with a range of stakeholders, including service users, to support the development of the service and drive improved outcomes for residents.
• Experience of identifying staff training needs and implementing effective solutions.
• A passion for monitoring and driving improved quality to ensure excellent services.
• Knowledge and experience of managing budgets.
• Proven ability to successfully motivate and lead a team
• Understanding of health inequalities and experience working with diverse populations, including ethnic minorities and individuals from deprived areas.
• A track record in service evaluation, analysing and presenting data.

Our Offer

We have a number of rewards and benefits available to our staff, to view these please visit our Rewards and Benefits page

Our aspiration is to be a truly flexible employer.  We welcome discussion on location, hours and working pattern as part of the application process.

You will be expected to demonstrate how you meet the key accountabilities and competencies in this Recruitment Pack.

Our Competency Framework and Qualification Guidance are to be read in conjunction with our Recruitment Pack.

For an informal discussion about this position, please contact: Martin Westerby at or call

To maintain a fair and consistent approach for applicants, it is Central Bedfordshire Council's policy to only consider applications made via our online application system and we therefore thank you for not submitting your application offline.

Our National Careers Service team offer a free monthly workshop covering CV writing and how to complete the statement sections of the Central Bedfordshire Council online application form. This MS Teams workshop is open to anyone from the UK and lasts around 1.5 hours.   Please book your place here.