Head of Sourcing

The United Kingdom Health Security Agency (UKHSA) is a system leader for health security; taking action internationally to strengthen global health security, providing trusted advice to government and the public and reducing inequalities in the way different communities experience and are impacted by infectious disease, environmental hazards, and other threats to health.

UKHSA's remit, as an agency with a global-to-local reach, is to protect the health of the nation from infectious diseases and other external threats to health. As the nation's expert national health security agency UKHSA will:

• Prevent: anticipate threats to health and help build the nation's readiness, defences and health security
• Detect: use cutting edge environmental and biological surveillance to proactively detect and monitor infectious diseases and threats to health
• Analyse: use world-class science and data analytics to assess and continually monitor threats to health, identifying how best to control and mitigate the risks
• Respond: take rapid, collaborative and effective actions nationally and locally to mitigate threats to health when they materialise
• Lead: lead strong and sustainable global, national, regional and local partnerships designed to save lives, protect the nation from public health threats and reduce inequalities

The Commercial, Vaccines and Countermeasures Delivery (CVCD) Directorate has responsibility for UKHSA's procurement, commercial strategy and governance, business development collaborations, countermeasures against environmental threats and the supply and distribution of vaccines for national immunisation campaigns and for Covid.

We maintain a complex ecosystem of contracts and partnerships that enable the agency to respond to current and emerging health challenges. We manage business development partnerships that drive innovation and generate income to support core UKHSA capabilities. Our challenge is to develop innovative commercial arrangements that will shape and support the agency's capabilities, preparations and response to health threats.

Job description This role sits within the Commercial Sourcing and Delivery team, which is responsible for providing expert commercial and procurement support through the end-to-end commercial lifecycle for UKHSA Directorates, programmes, and projects. The team drive value for UKHSA through managing contract delivery and supplier relationships to ensure the delivery of goods and services to UKHSA customers, and enabling self-sufficiency through the effective management of the MarketPlace platform.

Sourcing works across the end-to-end commercial lifecycle at UKHSA to deliver strategic procurements and programmes. As owners of the Commercial Pipeline, they ensure current and future demand is balanced against our resource profile - as well as assure the quality of information and data that is submitted to the pipeline.

Sourcing, and this role, deliver value to UKHSA customers, Major Programmes and Business Partners through the ability to provide procurement subject matter expertise and crucial input into business cases and sourcing strategies. Their commercial delivery responsibility is supplemented through turning insight into action by rationalising and aggregating commercial spend across suppliers, identifying cost efficiency opportunities and the implementation of initiatives to achieve them.

The role will report into the Deputy Director Commercial Sourcing and Delivery and will join the team at a busy time as a new Sourcing and Delivery structure and ways of working are embedded. It will oversee a team that manages procurements in a multi category health environment including, Estates, Technology, Science and Professional Services.

We are looking for a strong procurement professional with extensive experience in leading a sourcing team within a busy and challenging environment. You will be an enthusiastic and collaborative leader, championing commercial best practice and ensuring the Sourcing team delivers an efficient, compliant, and high-quality commercial service to UKHSA. You will also bring excellent communication and stakeholder engagement skills, building effective relationships with key stakeholders to ensure commercial thinking is positively embedded across the organisation.

Locations The successful candidate(s) will be able to agree a contractual workplace from those locations listed in this advert. When selecting your location listed in this job advert please be aware that this will be your contractual base location with a requirement to spend a minimum of 60% of your working time in this organisational workplace.

Your time spent on official duties at workplace locations other than your contractual office such as supplier, customer or partner locations required to perform your role is included in the 60% attendance.

This requirement will however take into consideration any reasonable adjustments agreed upon appointment for people with a disability, flexibilities agreed for those with specific caring responsibilities, or other similar temporary flexibilities.

Person specification The successful candidate will be responsible for managing the Commercial Sourcing and Delivery team to drive and deliver against the following activities:

Leadership and Development

• Leading the team to develop and manage end to end commercial strategies, negotiating complex deals and managing suppliers and partners.
• Continuing to ensure and embed an inclusive and collaborative culture within the team.
• Identifying, appraising, and mitigating procurement and commercial risks, reducing the exposure of UKHSA, driving supply chain performance and investment, monitoring the financial health of suppliers and increasing operational resilience.
• Enabling good governance through ensuring that commitments are met with compliant, good quality and appropriate submissions to boards and ministers.
• Develop strong strategic relationships with a range of internal and external stakeholders to maximise opportunities to collaborate, achieve efficiencies, improve capability and promote the procurement profession.
• Oversee the allocation and triage process of work allocations. Receive, review, prioritise and allocate work to central sourcing and delivery teams.
• Oversight and management of pipeline data and information in liaison with Commercial PMO.
• Playing a leading role on the UKHSA Approval Board.
• Manage stakeholders and communicate with impact, using different communication styles depending upon the needs of the particular audience.
• Ensure effective relationship management with Commercial Business Partners, understanding and working with the team to align the agency priorities within the resource profile.
• Provide consistent and clear commercial advice, guidance and oversight to internal and external stakeholders and be a key point of contact for the department for sourcing.
• Ensure the Department is compliant with all relevant Government, EU and Departmental policies, regulations and legislation.
• Comply with Civil Service policies and procedures; this includes ensuring that responses to Freedom of Information Requests and Parliamentary Questions are handled robustly and accurately.
• Build and lead a high-performing, engaged team in a hybrid environment, fostering a commercially focused culture, empowering staff, and promoting continuous development through clear performance management, capability building, and active support for individual career aspirations.
• Develop strong relationships with key stakeholders to enhance commercial understanding across the organisation, working collaboratively to deliver the team's vision, strengthen confidence, and drive improvement in sourcing capability and outcomes.
• Create an environment of trust, empowerment and accountability, understanding team strengths and skills gaps, encouraging innovation, and ensuring the team is supported to deliver high-quality commercial outcomes aligned with organisational priorities.
• Effectively support and upskill both commercial and non-commercial professionals. Develop and deliver training / workshop-based learning conducting targeted teach-ins. This should be done both proactively and on request.
• Lead or support the development, or create opportunities to improve, commercial leverage and drive best practice across all categories.

Sourcing

• Responsible for establishing and maintaining a robust Sourcing structure that will result in best-in-class procurement processes based upon the candidate's deep commercial expertise.
• Provide specialist commercial expertise to enable delivery of creative and innovative market leading commercial solutions.

• Support the development and delivery of the commercial strategy including planning, governance and performance management.
• Perform procurement reporting and analysis of management information to identify improvement opportunities.
• Ensure agreed cost savings, efficiencies and value add targets are delivered.
• Responsible for cascading guidance and direction on commercial principles and good practice and ensuring the correct application of commercial rules and principles apply.
• Ensure business continuity and that robust contingencies are in place for critical delivery.
• Lead and support the development of key documentation including business cases and tender documentation.
• Negotiate Commercial Agreements with third parties, coordinating interfaces and integrating across contracts and suppliers click apply for full job details