Principal Officer Strategic Solutions (for Development and Nature) x2

Reference number: 6411
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 Role

Do you want to make a real difference, working in a high priority area, securing significant environmental gains at a national level? These roles are a rare opportunity to play a part in bringing about systematic change to how the planning system works for nature and growth.

We are seeking ambitious individuals with great communication and organisational skills to join our highly performing, supportive and friendly teams across Natural England’s Sustainable Development work. Natural England’s new Strategy includes making a shift from isolated interventions to nature recovery happening at scale, ensuring our efforts deliver lasting improvement across whole landscapes and seascapes. As part of this, our Sustainable Development work is helping build better places, ensuring nature is designed into development and investment plans from the outset. We do this by advising and influencing Government Departments, regulators, the Office of Environmental Protection, industry, NE colleagues and others on how the land use and marine planning systems can protect and restore nature.

In these roles you will be working on the most important development impacts of our age. These are mostly cumulative, indirect impacts such as air pollution, water pollution, water shortage, habitat fragmentation, disturbance of sensitive species, and obstruction of natural coastal change. These are the impact types which present most risk to development and delivery of economic growth because they are difficult to resolve at site scale. They 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.

The team is currently engaged in a range of strategic solutions for offshore energy generation, air pollution, recreational disturbance and water resources. The breadth of this work will grow, as we aim to expand radically the range of strategic solutions available to secure positive outcomes from development.

Closing date: 6th March 2026.