Senior Officer Strategic Solutions (for Development and Nature)

Reference number: 6412
Working pattern: Full-time, Job share, Part-time
Location: Nationally – East Midlands (England), East of England, London (region), North East England, North West England, South East England, South West England, West Midlands (England), Yorkshire and the Humber.

Join us in shaping a future where nature and people thrive. Whether you’re drawn to hands-on conservation or playing a vital part behind the scenes, your work at Natural England will support lasting benefits for the environment and society.

Our Role

Natural England is the Government’s adviser for the natural environment and the Nature regulator with a wide range of statutory duties and powers. We provide the evidence, expertise and advice to recover Nature and shape better places for people to live. We do this working through and with others.

Strategic Outcomes for Nature

Our strategy is framed through four strategic outcomes. Each of these outcomes reinforces and amplifies the others, and together they address environmental, social and economic actions critical to thriving nature.

• Recovering Nature – Increased scale and quality of places where nature thrives.
• Building Better Places – Greener homes and infrastructure create healthier, more investable places, recognising we live better where nature thrives around us.
• Improving Health and Wellbeing – Build nature into everyday life so people can support, access and benefit from nature, wherever they live.
• Delivering Security through Nature – Nature helps us adapt to the threats of a changing climate and improves our national security, supporting more resilient food production, healthy soils, clean and plentiful water and clean air.

The Team

Do you want to make a real difference, working in a high priority area, securing significant environmental gains in the present and the future? Do you enjoy working in and leading a team? If so, this role may interest you as an opportunity to create a better future for people and nature.

The role is based nationally. Some travel may be required.

This role sits at the forefront of Natural England’s shift toward nature recovery at scale. Working with our national leads and Area Teams, you will help shape the next generation of housing and infrastructure delivery—supporting new settlements, accelerating large-scale developments, and ensuring nature is designed into places from the outset. This role offers a unique opportunity to influence how major development ambitions are delivered nationally, resolving complex issues through strategic, landscape-scale solutions that achieve win–wins for nature, communities and the economy.

We are seeking an ambitious individual with great communication and organisational skills to join our highly performing, supportive and friendly teams across Natural England’s Sustainable Development work.

Job Purpose

• Working nationally, you will have a strategic national coordination role, supporting Natural England’s Principal Officers for the New Towns and New Homes Accelerator Programmes to coordinate strategic approaches that unblock and accelerate housing and infrastructure development while maximising outcomes for nature recovery.
• You will work closely with Area Teams, developers, planning authorities and technical specialists to identify cross-cutting environmental barriers affecting large development sites, and develop proactive, strategic solutions that enable sustainable growth.
• You will champion early engagement with Natural England, promote nature-positive approaches to planned growth, and help ensure strategic mitigation and investment is targeted where it delivers the greatest benefit for people and nature.
• The focus will be on the impact types which present most risk to development and delivery of economic growth because they are difficult to resolve at site scale. These include cumulative, indirect impacts such as air pollution, water pollution, water shortage, habitat fragmentation, disturbance of sensitive species, and obstruction of natural coastal change.
• These impacts require strategic solutions which will address impacts at many sites and deliver gains for nature on a large scale. We are looking for win-wins which will help society to meet its broad objectives, including the boosting of nature’s recovery.

Your role will be to:

• Work closely with Natural England’s national and area team leads for the New Towns and New Homes Accelerator Programmes to identify and address thematic environmental issues causing delays to large housing and infrastructure projects.
• Provide proactive advice and support to developers, planning authorities and stakeholders to help unblock major development proposals while securing nature-positive outcomes.
• Coordinate with Area Teams to ensure consistent, aligned strategic approaches across the country, sharing insights, best practice and technical expertise.
• Identify opportunities for strategic solutions that address cumulative and cross-boundary impacts such as air quality, water quality, hydrology, fragmentation or coastal change, and support their development, design and delivery.
• Build effective partnerships with key stakeholders including local authorities, statutory agencies, developers, infrastructure bodies and environmental partners, helping resolve complex issues affecting major housing proposals.
• Convene partnerships and collaborate with experts to ensure that solutions are deliverable and achieve real benefits.
• Help target large-scale investment to mitigation measures which will make the most difference to nature’s recovery.

Closing date: 6th March 2026.