The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) touches the lives of every citizen in our country at some point. As the UK government’s largest public service provider, we support people into work, help disabled people live more independent lives, improve housing and tackle homelessness, provide the financial foundation for a secure old age through the State Pension, and ensure children of separated parents have more opportunity to fulfil their potential through a better child maintenance system. We are passionate about making a sustainable and positive impact to people’s lives every day by providing a modern, fair, and affordable welfare system. We seek to be an exemplar of the Modern Civil Service so that we can better deliver for citizens and meet the challenges of tomorrow.
The Child Maintenance Service (CMS) is a directorate within DWP that helps separated parents by encouraging and supporting them to make private financial arrangements, and providing a statutory maintenance service where this is not possible for their children, including taking legal enforcement action to collect money when appropriate.
Our service is provided by over 4,000 colleagues, across 8 locations, supporting 900,000 children by arranging and collecting over £1.2 Billion in maintenance annually. Our mission is simple, ‘Get money to children’ to support their life chances and help to lift out of poverty.
This is an exciting time to be joining CMS as we continue with our ambitious programme of service modernisation. As Head of Service, you will have a critical role alongside three colleagues in providing strategic leadership with accountability for all aspects of service delivery, people plans and embedding significant change including digitalisation and demand deduction.
The successful candidate will be responsible for:
* Providing inspirational and resourceful leadership to a large team of up to 1,000 colleagues, across several locations through direct line management of Senior Operational Leaders (Grade 7s), in a complex, fast paced operational environment to deliver a quality service. This will include workforce planning, resource deployment, capability plans and all aspect of performance management to meet service level requirements.
* Leading through a period of accelerated change for the organisation and have an influential role in shaping the strategic direction, communicated to colleagues through our CMS Story – enabling a digital transformation programme that delivers increased efficiency and service improvements and supporting the design and implementation of a new organisational model.
* Demonstrating visible leadership through a commitment to people engagement and driving cultural change by empowering others to develop, you will be expected to continue establishing a culture of continuous improvement through remote line management across multiple sites.
* Lead accountability for specific customer segments providing vision and reporting up to the CMS Executive Team, Director General and Minister, i.e. Applications, Maintenance, Benefits and Telephony and Portfolios i.e., Quality.
* There may be a requirement to lead one of our Service Centres in a sponsorship role.
* As this role covers various locations across the UK, you will be expected to commit to frequent travel and overnight stays.
Proud member of the Disability Confident employer scheme
Disability Confident
About Disability Confident
A Disability Confident employer will generally offer an interview to any applicant that declares they have a disability and meets the minimum criteria for the job as defined by the employer. It is important to note that in certain recruitment situations such as high-volume, seasonal and high-peak times, the employer may wish to limit the overall numbers of interviews offered to both disabled people and non-disabled people. For more details please go to Disability Confident .