Area Repairs Manager WCC618512

Job Details:

Salary range: £54,684 - £67,500 per annum
Work location: Westminster Area Office with location to be one of Paddington, Maida Vale, Pimlico or Marylebone
Hours per week: 36
Contract type: Permanent x 4 
Closing date: 3 March 2025

About Us:

THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM 

Housing and Commercial Partnerships in Westminster City Council is a world of extraordinary stories. Where people use their vision and commitment to open doors for the next generations. 

Nothing beats the feeling of helping someone find their passion. At Westminster City Council, our City Lions team helps young local people engage with culture, creativity and dreams. When they came across a lonely, isolated 16-year-old who called himself a failure, they knew what to do. They worked 1-2-1 to find the thing this boy really loved. YouTube, it turned out. But it’s impossible to turn that into a career, right? Wrong. A week later, he was enrolled on the British Film Institute film-making programme. It was the ultimate light-bulb moment. And it turned him into what he is today – a budding Spielberg with a world of opportunity at his feet. 

Please view the extraordinary story of the Impossible Dream here.

The Role:

As an Area Repairs Manager in our Housing Services team, you can make your own powerful contribution. Ensuring our residents are living in safe, well-maintained and high-quality homes, you will use your expert knowledge of building construction technology to maintain buildings and diagnose their defects.

We believe that everyone deserves a great quality of life, regardless of whether they are in council housing or privately rented accommodation. Taking ownership of a number of allocated estates in Westminster, you will therefore be responsible for leading the Repairs and Operation Service, managing the repairs and maintenance of a large number of properties that are in our housing portfolio, and overseeing key strategic projects. With an eye on the future, you will determine key investment needs and take the lead in developing new partnerships. 

With a large community of people relying on your services, you will work with residents, fellow Surveyors and contractors to understand the issues at hand, and resolve challenging problems. Putting the resident experience at the heart of every decision, you will work directly with individual tenants and wider resident groups, ensuring their voices are heard as you share proposals that will impact on their homes or living environments. 

On a day-to-day basis you will maintain a close eye on specific jobs, inspecting works and seeing to it that they’re being completed to the highest standards. Managing relationships with contractors to ensure the best value is being obtained from the relevant contracts, you will also inspect communal areas and the exterior of properties, identifying where reactive repairs and cyclical maintenance are required.  

Making a real difference to residents as you drive improvements in their living environments, you will help us deliver on our mission to offer homes that are well-managed, environmentally sound and genuinely affordable. 

Please refer to the Job Description for more information.

About You:

Coming from an engineering, surveying or building-related background, you will have experience of managing contracts relating to large scale repair and maintenance services. You will therefore be comfortable setting up and managing systems documenting works on a large portfolio of residential properties.

This role will ultimately have an impact on the safety and wellbeing of people in their home environments, so we will expect you to have a good knowledge of building services and the regulatory framework relating to gas, water and electricity in domestic buildings. With a fluent knowledge of health and safety legislation and how this applies to the construction sector, you will also have an expert level knowledge of Building Regulations, Planning Law and Leasehold Consultation. 

With exceptional communication and relationship building skills, you will appreciate the value of taking the time to explain proposals so that residents are in agreement with our plans to improve their homes. Comfortable managing complaints when necessary, your interpersonal skills will also be essential when getting contractors and partners to work to your intended outcomes. 

As a numerate and highly analytical individual who is comfortable managing budgets and writing reports, you will bring a commercial mindset to this role, and you will have the capacity to analyse complex performance data. 

Westminster City Council is committed to supporting Care Leavers into the workplace. Care Leavers seeking their first job and who wish to be considered under our scheme, will automatically be invited to interview should they meet the essential criteria for the role.

The Council is committed to achieving diverse shortlists to support our desire to increase the number of staff from underrepresented groups in our workforce. We especially encourage applications from a Global Majority (GM), people who are Black, Asian, Brown, dual-heritage, indigenous to the global south, and or have been racialised as 'ethnic minorities' (formally known as B.A.M.E , Black, Asian and multiple ethnic) background and, while the role is open to all applicants,  we will utilise the positive action provisions of the Equality Act 2010 to appoint a candidate from a global majority background where there is a choice between two candidates of equal merit. If you are from a Global Majority background you can self-declare this to the hiring manager as part of our positive action commitments.

What We Offer:

Westminster is an amazing place. We are home to more than 200,000 residents from all backgrounds, over 50,000 vibrant and vital businesses and three-quarters-of-a-million people work in Westminster. Westminster City Council’s strategy is to work towards a Fairer Westminster. A Fairer Westminster is one in which our communities are at the heart of our decision-making and help to determine the city’s future. By working directly with our communities and other partners, we can build a more inclusive city that celebrates our diverse communities, and where residents, workers and visitors from all backgrounds will feel welcome and safe.

At Westminster City Council, we pride ourselves on being an inclusive workplace and employer of choice. We encourage and welcome applications from people from all backgrounds and aim to have a workforce that, at all levels, represents the communities we serve. We champion equality, diversity, inclusion and wellbeing and aim to create a workplace where everyone feels valued, has a sense of belonging and is empowered to be their best, that is the Westminster Way. To find out more about how we do this visit  https://www.westminster.gov.uk/health-and-social-care/public-health-strategy-policies-and-reports/equality-duties

As a forward-thinking Council we appreciate that people work in different ways, therefore our staff benefit from working a range of flexible working patterns as well as Agile working.

The Council is a Disability Confident Employer. If you have declared a disability in your application, we guarantee an interview if you meet the essential criteria of the job. If you are invited for interview, you will be asked if you need any reasonable adjustments in order to attend, and we will make these wherever possible.