Kent Fire and Rescue Service
Assistant Director People and Culture
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Job Title: Assistant Director, People and Culture (HR)
Location: Service Headquarters, Tovil, Maidstone, ME15 6XB – With regular presences across stations and sites in Kent
Hours: Full Time
Pension: Automatic membership of the Local Government Pension Scheme – career average pension scheme with 16.5% employer contribution
Holidays: In addition to bank/ public holidays you will receive 33 days holiday
Base Salary: £121,110 per annum
Reference: R001069
Being a part of Kent Fire and Rescue Service
Everyone is unique. Everyone has value. Everyone helps to make Kent Fire and Rescue Service (KFRS) a great place to work. We are one team. Together with our customers we are creating a safer future for Kent and Medway.
Being the Assistant Director, People & Culture
An exciting opportunity to spearhead the people agenda for Kent Fire & Rescue Service that protects 1.9 million people.
Kent Fire and Rescue Service exists to keep the communities of Kent safe. Whether we can do that, now and as demands change, comes down to our people: the skills they have, the leaders they work for, and the culture they work within.
We are looking for an Assistant Director, People & Culture to own all three.
The Assistant Director, People and Culture will be a senior people leader who has owned strategy and been accountable for its outcomes, not HR operations alone.
This is our lead people role and a seat on the Corporate Management Board. You will be the Chief Executive’s principal adviser on people risk, with the professional authority to examine decisions at any level that create legal, ethical or cultural exposure. We will judge you on outcomes, not activity.
What you’ll do
You will be accountable for our People & Culture Enabling Plan and for making sure it demonstrably serves our Community Risk Management Plan. In practice, that means:
- Strategic workforce planning – modelling future demand, skills, retirement risk and the impact of new technology, and turning that into resourcing, development and succession plans that take a skills-based approach to opportunity.
- Culture as a programme, not an aspiration – embedding the Code of Ethical Conduct in how we recruit, promote, develop and hold people to account; owning the routes by which colleagues raise concerns; and giving the Board and the Authority an honest, evidenced picture of culture, including findings leaders may not wish to hear.
- Leadership and learning – assuring leadership development from first-line supervision to executive level, ensuring senior leaders receive meaningful feedback, and building coaching capability across the service.
- Inclusion with measurable outcomes – fair processes in attraction, progression, retention and pay, lawful positive action where disadvantage is evidenced, and choices that withstand legal and public scrutiny.
- Wellbeing at source – a preventative approach to psychosocial risk, trauma-informed practice designed around operational and on-call working, and occupational health providers commissioned to defined outcomes.
- Employee and industrial relations – acting as lead negotiator with recognised trade unions, sustaining relationships robust enough to survive real disagreement, and preparing the service for a changing industrial relations landscape.
- Legal compliance and change – keeping our policies lawful and usable, leading readiness for the phased implementation of the Employment Rights Act 2025 and sponsoring major organisational change from design through to benefits realisation.
- People data and technology – acting as Information Asset Owner for HR data and systems and advising the Board on the workforce consequences of technology adopted across the organisation, including AI-enabled tools.
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What you’ll bring
- Extensive, current knowledge of employment law and HR practice, and a clear grasp of how political, social and regulatory change affects service delivery.
- A track record of advising and questioning at board level, with examples of positions held under pressure.
- Experience of leading complex change from conception to embedded delivery, within real financial constraints.
- Experience of trade union negotiation and collective bargaining, and of handling serious and sensitive employee relations and misconduct matters.
- Evidence of embedding wellbeing and inclusion strategies that improved colleagues’ experience of work.
- The ability to interrogate workforce data yourself, and to use it to change a stance, with a demonstrable result.
- Credibility with very different audiences, from firefighters on station to an Authority committee.
- Chartered MCIPD (or international equivalent) and CIPD Level 7, a degree, or equivalent professional expertise gained through experience.
- Experience in a unionised, operational, shift-based or safety-critical environment, of cultural change following external scrutiny, or of governing new people technology would be an advantage but is not essential.
A note on qualifications: we deliberately recognise equivalent experience alongside formal qualification. If you meet the standard through practice, we want to hear from you.
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Benefits
- Automatic membership of the Local Government Pension Scheme
- Enhanced Annual Leave entitlement
- Annual Salary increase - Increase of 1 scale point per year within Grade to the top of the Grade.
- Blue Light Card discount scheme supported by a number of high street retailers
- CSSC Card - Discount provider for civil servants and public sector workers
- Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) - Confidential support service designed to help manage personal or work-related issues that may affect health, wellbeing, or job performance.
- A range of family friendly policies promoting work-life balance
- Free to join internal clubs and colleague forums
- Access to health and wellbeing services and advice
- Access to Gym Facilities
- Free parking
- Above all you’ll become part of a service that is committed to the safety of our community
How to apply
Please complete an online application and CV by Monday 28th September 2026.
For an informal, confidential conversation about the role, contact Mark Edwards, Talent Acquisition Manager, mark.edwards@kent.fire-uk.org
Interviews will be held in person Wednesday 7th and Thursday 8th October and include an Assessment Day on site at Headquarters (ME15 6XB).
We reserve the right to close this vacancy upon receiving a sufficient number of applications. If you are interested in this role, we recommend that you submit your application at the earliest opportunity.
Inclusion is at the heart of everything we do. We know that great minds don’t think alike, so we rely on diverse thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and backgrounds to create the best working environment that we can possibly offer.
Kent Fire and Rescue Service, its employees, and volunteers are committed to safeguarding, protecting, and supporting children, young people, and adults at risk. As part of our safer recruitment process, we will undertake pre-employment checks to verify your suitability for the role. These checks will include your references and a standard or enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) check. Enhanced DBS check with barred lists are carried out for roles with direct and unsupervised access to children, young people, and adults at risk. Risk assessments will be undertaken on any disclosures identified as part of the pre-employment checks.
As a Public Sector organisation with added responsibilities under the Equality Act, 2010 the candidate must demonstrate an understanding of what is meant by Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion and how this fits in with their everyday work.
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