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Department: Regulated Power
Location: Oxford
Description
Location: Oxford
Contract Type: Permanent
Working Pattern: Full-Time
Office Based: Yes
Regular Travel: Yes
Pay / Benefits
Remuneration for this role is benchmarked competitively within our sector.
The Opportunity
The UK's electricity network is undergoing significant investment and expansion, and effective planning is critical to delivering infrastructure projects successfully. As a Planning Manager at OCU, you'll play a central role in supporting the delivery of major power infrastructure programmes, ensuring planning approvals, conditions, and compliance requirements are managed efficiently throughout the project lifecycle.
This is an opportunity to work on nationally significant projects while collaborating with clients, designers, delivery teams, and regulatory stakeholders. If you enjoy solving complex challenges, influencing project outcomes, and helping critical infrastructure move from concept to delivery, this could be the role for you.
What You'll Do
- Lead planning activities across multiple infrastructure projects from pre-construction through to project completion.
- Prepare, submit, and manage planning applications, approvals, amendments, and variations.
- Monitor planning conditions and compliance requirements, ensuring obligations are met throughout delivery.
- Provide planning advice and guidance to project teams to support programme certainty and efficient delivery.
- Liaise with Local Planning Authorities, statutory consultees, landowners, and other external stakeholders.
- Coordinate with engineering, environmental, and delivery teams to develop high-quality planning submissions.
- Identify planning-related risks and implement mitigation measures to minimise programme impacts.
- Maintain accurate planning records, trackers, reports, and compliance documentation.
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Essential
What You'll Bring
- Degree qualified in Town Planning or a related discipline.
- RTPI chartership, or actively working towards chartered status.
- Experience within planning, infrastructure development, construction, or consultancy environments.
- Strong understanding of the UK planning system and construction-phase compliance requirements.
- Experience supporting multiple projects or complex infrastructure schemes simultaneously.
- Excellent stakeholder engagement, communication, and relationship management skills.
- Strong organisational skills with excellent attention to detail.
- Full UK driving licence.
Desirable
- Experience delivering planning activities for electricity, utilities, energy, or infrastructure projects.
- Bonus if you have experience working on substations, overhead lines, underground cable, or power network projects.
- It would be great if you've worked within a Tier 1 contractor or major infrastructure delivery environment.
- It would be great if you have experience managing planning conditions, CEMPs, or construction-phase approvals.
- Understanding of how planning interfaces with engineering, programme management, and commercial delivery would be advantageous.
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What We Offer
At OCU, we believe that meaningful work should come with meaningful support. That's the principle behind Careers with Purpose, our commitment to ensuring every person at OCU feels supported, developed, and valued, not just in their role today, but throughout their career with us.
Alongside the opportunity to work on some of the UK's most significant infrastructure projects, we offer a benefits package that we are continuing to develop as we grow, and the kind of career acceleration that only comes from being inside a business moving at this pace.
As a rapidly growing organisation, there are genuine opportunities to progress, broaden your experience, and build a long-term career within OCU Group.
For a confidential conversation about this opportunity, please contact Jonathan Bryden at jonathan.bryden@ocugroup.com.
Our vacancies are typically advertised for two weeks; however, we reserve the right to close applications early should we receive a sufficient number of suitable candidates. We therefore encourage early applications.
To ensure that everyone has a fair opportunity to join our team, please inform us if you require any reasonable adjustments to our recruitment and interview process by emailing recruitment@ocugroup.com.
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