Health and Safety Advisor

Health and Safety (H&S) Advisor

Full time permanent - 37hrs per week (flexible working arrangements will be considered)

Base Location: Pity Me, Durham (this role will cover the NWL operating area across the North East)

Salary:  From £43,730 - £54,663 (depending on experience) + car allowance

About the role

We’ve an amazing opportunity to join us as a H&S Advisor within our Health, Safety and Security team here at Northumbrian Water.  You’ll be a key enabler and supporter in delivering our aspiration of having a world class safety culture, enabling our employees, contractors, customers, and visitors to go home safe every day!

Working closely with various operational teams, you will ensure practical processes are in place for employees to understood and follow. Working closely with all levels of site staff you will play a major role in guaranteeing site hazards are controlled, whilst ensuring legal compliance with regulations such as DSEAR, COMAH etc.

The role will require the delivery of onsite training of some Northumbrian Water’s key processes, such as, permit to work, lock off tag off and contractor engagement, helping ensure that high hazard activities are understood and adequately controlled.  You’ll act as a subject matter expert (SME) for all health and safety matters across your designated business areas, ensuring that technical information and legislative requirements are translated into the business in a pragmatic, easy and effective way.

You’ll be ensuring the language and approach used is consistent with driving a positive, customer focused world class safety culture within a learning organisation, along with investigating accidents and incidents, providing detailed root cause analysis (RCA) and learnings to assist the business in preventing recurrences.

You’ll be working with stakeholders ensuring that health and safety initiatives enhance and compliment the wider businesses strategy including attendance at allocated business area meetings and providing business and local updates on health and safety performance.  We’re also looking for you to be undertaking site visits/audits/inspections to measure compliance and governance. Understanding from an employee’s perspective why activities can deviate from expected performance and processes.

About you

We are seeking someone with a proactive attitude, strong work ethic and the ability to deal with a demanding workload to join the team and make a real difference. To have previous H&S experience and working knowledge of DSEAR is essential. You’ll have or be willing to achieve NEBOSH Diploma or an equivalent H&S qualification, which will feed into attainment of Chartered status of IOSH (CMIOSH). 

You will need to be able to demonstrate influencing skills at all levels of the organisation, along with excellent people skills (engaging, listening, and understanding people’s needs), as well as proven experience of producing and delivering high quality communications (presentations, reports, and emails).

You’ll need a solution focused approach to problem solving and adopting a “one team” approach to achieve this. You’ll demonstrate an engaging communication style with an ability to work with all levels of the business. In addition, you will have proven ability to work collaboratively across the health and safety team and wider business functions.

We’re looking for you to be willing to learn new technical skills to enhance safety performance within the business, along with having an proven ability to, ‘think’, ‘feel’, ‘say’ and ‘do’, aligned to the safety culture aspiration and NWG vision and values in everything they do.

You’ll be open minded and willing to try new working methods and initiatives to improve safety, health, and wellbeing across the business, along with proven communication skills, able to present effectively and facilitate safety culture workshops and presentations.

We’re looking for you to be able to work independently and without direct supervision and line management and be able to deliver key department objectives and strategies, along with the ability to deal with managing change and a demanding workload.

A full valid UK driving licence is essential for this role.

Here at Northumbrian Water, we embrace and value Diversity, Inclusion and Equity, and encourage all colleagues to bring their most authentic self to work.

Our colleague network groups include our Rainbow Support Network (LGBTQIA+), REACH (Race, Ethnicity, and Cultural Heritage), WiSTEM (Women in STEM) and Thisability (disability and neurodiversity) networks. They provide a safe space for colleagues from diverse backgrounds, welcoming all colleagues regardless of their personal characteristics to participate in valuable conversation that improves our organisational awareness, understanding and inclusivity.

We encourage and welcome all applications, as we strive to be an equal opportunity employer, committed to having diverse communities represented within all our teams, structures, and organisation. 

About us

Here are NWG we strive to make Northumbrian Water Group (NWG) a Great Place to Work, for all. We embrace and value Diversity, Inclusion and Equity and encourage you to bring your full self to work. As an equal opportunity employer we’re committed to having a diverse community represented across our business.

We’re aware that not everyone will have every skill listed in the job description, and that female candidates are less likely to apply if they don’t have the full range of skills, however if you have some of the skills listed, we 'd encourage you to apply.

NWG at a glance:

Our purpose at NWG is caring for the essential needs of our communities and environment, now and for generations to come.

We do this by providing reliable and affordable water and wastewater services for our customers.

We make a positive difference by operating efficiently and investing prudently, to maintain a sustainable and resilient business.

Our vision is to be the national leader in the provision of sustainable water and wastewater services. To support us in achieving our vision, we have five core values which are the guiding principles, defining who we are, what we do and how we do it.

Our benefits

We’re a Great Place to Work because of the amazing people who work for us, and to say thank you we offer a range of benefits to colleagues.

Benefits to include, here’s just a few of them:

• Enhanced maternity pay

• Enhanced annual leave with additional special leave for Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve
• Company pension scheme
• Digital GP
• Award winning wellbeing website
• Employee Assistance Programme
• Life assurance
• Qualification loans
• Professional subscription
• Buy and sell annual leave
• Discounts and cashback offers

This role has also been defined as a safety or security critical role and as a condition of a formal offer of employment you’ll be required to undergo a drug and alcohol test. 

Prospective employees and agency workers in defined safety and security critical roles will be required to undertake a drug and alcohol test after the job offer has been made. This will be prior to or within four weeks of their start date. 

Prospective employees and agency workers who fail a pre-employment urine drug screen will have their sample analysed by the Company appointed laboratory as a matter of course. Failing a pre-employment drugs or alcohol test may lead to the job offer being revoked

Please note this role may require a DBS to be completed prior to employment