Ministry of Justice

The Role: 

HM Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) is seeking an outstanding director to lead the Strategy and Analysis directorate. This director level role has overall accountability for looking across the piece at HMCTS’s work, charting a future path for the organisation working in partnership with the judiciary and colleagues across the ministry, and ensuring current activity aligns well with this direction.    

The role will be cross organisational and cross system in focus and will be pivotal in advising ministers and the judiciary and the HMCTS Board of the big choices which need to be taken in respect of the courts and tribunals in seeing that the governance framework operates as efficiently as possible and in alignment with the Framework agreement.  

Critically the post holder will report on HMCTS performance and will be responsible for further improving our data landscape and leveraging that landscape to provide new insights with a view to driving performance improvement. 

Key Responsibilities: 

• Leading a team of 150 colleagues to shape the future direction of HMCTS through championing the vision set by the HMCTS Board, assisting the Executive Team to grip tricky issues and deliver change and strategic outcomes, by:​  

1. driving strategic choices and alignment through supporting accountable and transparent planning, and delivery;​  
2. empowering the organisation to be evidence-led providing and encouraging use of information to enable making the right decisions, at the right time;​  
3. working on behalf of and with senior leadership to develop and deliver workable, evidenced, solutions for implementation; ​  
4. using insight to improve users’ experience and organisational efficiency to support the wider organisation and on to the Board, Ministers, Judiciary and justice partners in delivering access to justice. 

• Leading in ways which promote a diverse and inclusive working culture and in ways which recognise the specialisms and professional expertise of your team and providing your support to those professional judgements. 

• Working collaboratively with MoJ colleagues and HMCTS Board, leading on development and alignment of HMCTS future strategy, alongside horizon scanning to identify and consider emerging areas of interest and challenge, including overseeing the Board Secretariat and corporate governance. 

• Being the critical interface with MoJ policy teams, identifying opportunities to co-create and co-produce work that addresses key departmental issues, in particular work to drive productivity across the courts and tribunals and being accountable for the planning and running of the annual judicial recruitment programme. 

• Being the HMCTS Director responsible for shaping the work of the Courts and Tribunals joint unit and working across the organisation to ensure the unit’s work is focused on our collective priorities. 

• Being accountable – through professional experts - for providing consistent, accurate and timely performance data, analysis, insight and evaluation needed by HMCTS and the wider MoJ to deliver justice and to meet the needs of Parliament and public users. 

• In parallel being accountable – through professional experts – for providing the quantitative and qualitative insight and evidence that services need to continuously improve and meet the needs of users. 

• Delivering the Data Strategy priorities to improve the way that HMCTS gathers, manages and exploits its data and the data quality programme to ensure that our data meets the standards we need and others expect. 

• Leading ongoing development of HMCTS performance management framework to support the understanding of HMCTS and system performance by Ministers, senior judges and senior colleagues in the MoJ and using that opportunity to contribute to driving better performance for our users and the public more widely. 

• Leading in a highly complex stakeholder environment, building and maintaining effective relationships with MoJ and HMCTS colleagues, senior judicial partners and senior representatives within justice system

Essential Experience: 

The ideal candidate will: 

• Lead through ambiguity providing the team with the direction to make progress in a changing environment. 

• Have the ability to form effective working relationships at a senior level with a wide variety of partners and through those relationships to deliver for the justice system and its users. 

• Be able to see (and describe) the big picture and to use that to make tactical decisions towards our bigger goals.  

• Deliver through others – keeping focus despite competing pressures.