Assurance Lead Hse

Are you looking for a role where you can use your expertise to lead and influence change within the occupational health and safety sector? Are you a Health and Safety leglislation expert?

As a **leading Housing Association**, Sovereign are committed to providing quality, affordable homes and services within **sustainable, successful communities**. We're led by our values and driven by a strong social purpose, placing our residents at the heart of everything we do.

We're looking for a passionate **Health, Safety & Environment (HS&E) Assurance Lead** to join us on a permanent basis, this is a newly created role, which will provide the right person with a fantastic opportunity to make an impact.

This is a key role for us, we are looking for a solution driven individual who has strong evidenced based experience around HSE Management, covering audit, delivery plans, and monitoring.

**The role**:
You'll be reporting directly to the Head of Assurance, working in an established team alongside building safety and assurance professionals. Using your industry knowledge and expertise you'll be responsible for shaping and leading an assurance programmefocused primarily on occupational HS&E. You'll provide assurance regarding the identification and systematic management of our risks, and that we do what we say we'll do to meet our regulatory obligations and keep our employees & contractors safe.

This role can be based from our Basingstoke HQ or Bristol offices.

**What**you'll**be doing**:

- Run the development and execution of independent assurance reviews collaborating with the health, safety and environment (HS&E) team as required.
- Deliver clear, reliable, evidence based conclusions which provide assurance that we manage our occupational HS&E risks systematically, that our policies, processes and procedures are fit for purpose, in-place and operating effectively to maintain regulatorycompliance and achieve Sovereign's sector leading health and safety ambition.
- Lead the HSE assurance process to both identify gaps and the actions necessary to sustainably close those gaps; collaborate with internal stakeholders to ensure mutually agreed understanding of gaps and actions. In addition, to identify and share good HSEpractice.
- Own the monitoring of assurance actions to completion, ensuring thorough evidential closure and resulting in improved business process design and implementation.
- Lead, coach and influence a wide range of internal and external stakeholders to ensure there is a full understanding of assurance, sharing knowledge and good practice across the organisation, including a view of expected future opportunities and challenges.
- Collaborate with the HS&E team, in particular to provide input to the development of corporate HS&E standards and to the design of operational HS&E assurance activities.
- Represent the assurance team as a key stakeholder in technical and strategic projects and wider internal governance audits.

**What we need from you**:

- Significant experience within health, safety and environment, in a large operational organisation. Any experience within housing would be beneficial but is not essential.
- Extensive experience in the design and execution of HS&E audit programmes, as well as collaborating with stakeholders to establish sustainable action plans which ensure findings are systematically addressed.
- Ability to reach and communicate, in written & verbal form, reliable, evidence-based conclusions regarding compliance with regulatory and corporate/internal HS&E requirements.
- Strong working knowledge of how HS&E risks are managed at a practical level within a complex and challenging operational setting.
- Attention to detail combined with the ability to step back and see the bigger picture.
- Strong relationship building and stakeholder engagement skills.
- A tenacious but supportive attitude, with experience of driving change and improvement.
- Great team working and engagement stills to work across the organisation to achieve our goals.
- A professional qualification in Health and Safety, such as NEBOSH Diploma (NVQ level 5 or 6) or equivalent, is essential.

It's a fantastic time to join us at Sovereign. We have an ambitious corporate plan to deliver an inspiring agenda of change and growth in a sustainable way. You'll be joining a highly skilled team at the forefront of driving these improvements and we'd loveto hear from you to explore your skills and experience further.