Financial Services Senior Policy Advisers

North East Combined Authority; Tees Valley; Hybrid; GBP 52,000 - 75,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

25 days annual leave

Flexitime

Flexible working patterns

Parental and adoption leave

Defined Benefit pension scheme (employ

Cycle-to-work scheme

Staff networks

Job summary

North East Combined Authority invites you to shape the UK's financial services policy landscape, advising ministers and senior officials with evidence-led analysis. You will coordinate reforms, deliver policy across portfolios, and build strong relationships with regulators, industry, and international partners in a fast-paced environment.

Join a collaborative team that values decisive judgement, inclusivity, and strong communication to support growth, resilience and regulation of the financial

Responsibilities

• Guide the Government's long-term strategy across your portfolio, ensuring policy is grounded in evidence, adaptive to technological and economic developments, and consistent with broader priorities.
• Build policy proposals, resolve complex challenges, and use robust analysis to assess impacts, trade-offs, and implementation considerations.
• Coordinate the delivery of reforms, programmes, or legislation from approval through to implementation and evaluation, with effective governance and risk management.
• Provide clear, high-quality written and verbal advice to ministers, special advisers, and senior officials on complex and finely balanced issues.
• Develop impactful connections across government, regulators, industry, and, where relevant, consumer groups and international partners.
• Lead and develop team members, crafting an inclusive and encouraging environment that promotes high performance.
• You will work in a fast-paced environment with ministers, senior leaders, and external collaborators. Whichever portfolio you join, you will help achieve the Government's goals for a competitive, innovative, resilient, and well-regulated financial services sector.

Job description

Do you want to build high-profile financial services policy that affects consumers, businesses, and economic growth across the UK? If so, we would love to hear from you!

About the Team

The Financial Services Group provides advice to the Government on encouraging a stable, efficient, and well-regulated financial services sector. This sector produces strong outcomes for consumers and businesses, boosts economic growth, and reinforces the UK's global financial centre status. Our scope includes lending, insurance, pensions, technology, innovation, and international financial services. We engage closely with regulators, industry, consumer groups, government departments, and international partners. We are an inclusive, collaborative team that values new perspectives and supports colleagues' development while handling fast paced, high-profile policy matters.

About the Job

• Guide the Government's long-term strategy across your portfolio, ensuring policy is grounded in evidence, adaptive to technological and economic developments, and consistent with broader priorities.
• Build policy proposals, resolve complex challenges, and use robust analysis to assess impacts, trade-offs, and implementation considerations.
• Coordinate the delivery of reforms, programmes, or legislation from approval through to implementation and evaluation, with effective governance and risk management.
• Provide clear, high-quality written and verbal advice to ministers, special advisers, and senior officials on complex and finely balanced issues.
• Develop impactful connections across government, regulators, industry, and, where relevant, consumer groups and international partners.
• Lead and develop team members, crafting an inclusive and encouraging environment that promotes high performance.
• You will work in a fast-paced environment with regular exposure to ministers, senior leaders, and external collaborators. Whichever portfolio you join, you will help achieve the Government's goals for a competitive, innovative, resilient, and well-regulated financial services sector.

Opportunities Available

1. Americas: Manage the UK's financial services relationships across the Americas, promoting shared priorities, market access, and regulatory cooperation through bilateral and multilateral engagement.
2. Business Engagement: Lead strategic engagement with financial services businesses so that market insight informs policy and delivery, including senior relationships, high-profile events, and speeches.
3. Business Lending: Promote policy reforms that facilitate access to finance, including contributions to the Commercial Credit Data Sharing scheme, and counsel ministers on business banking topics.
4. Challenger Banks and FinTech: Help the UK remain a leading global centre for challenger banks and fintechs by crafting policy that supports innovation, competition, investment, and growth.
5. Consumer Credit: Guide reforms for a modern and proportionate consumer credit framework that supports innovation and growth while protecting consumers.
6. Europe, Middle East and Africa: Build financial services engagement across strategically important markets, deepening regulatory cooperation, promoting UK interests, and addressing market-access issues.
7. G20 Digital Assets: Guide policy creation and preparations for financial services priorities during the UK's G20 Presidency in 2027, including work on digitalised markets.
8. Homeownership Schemes: Lead policy on government-backed homeownership schemes, balancing the interests of consumers, lenders, and taxpayers while coordinating delivery.
9. Mortgages: Develop policy for a resilient and competitive mortgage market, advise ministers on priority issues, and cultivate positive relationships with regulators, industry, and consumer representatives.
10. Pensions Markets: Guide intricate regulatory and market reforms that encourage well-functioning pension markets, positive results for savers, and a balanced, competitive sector.
11. Pensions Investment: Lead policy to unlock more productive pensions investment and help long-term savings support UK growth, innovation, and infrastructure.

About You

You will be able to lead complex policy work, work closely with partners to evaluate various factors, apply good judgement, and suggest conclusions even when facing uncertainty. You will understand the broader political and economic environment and incorporate this into your policy advice. You will also present complex information clearly and convincingly to senior leaders, ministers, and external participants, tailoring your approach to your audience. Strong critical thinking, relationship-building, and effective delivery skills will help you succeed across any of the available portfolios.

Some of the Benefits our people love!

• 25 days annual leave (rising to 30 after 5 years), plus 8 public holidays and the King's birthday (unless you have a legacy arrangement as an existing Civil Servant). Additionally, we operate flexitime systems, allowing employees to take up to an additional 2 days off each month
• Flexible working patterns (part-time, job-share, condensed hours)
• Generous parental and adoption leave packages
• Access to a generous Defined Benefit pension scheme with employer contributions of 28.97%
• Access to a cycle-to-work salary sacrifice scheme and season ticket advances
• A range of active staff networks, based around interests (e.g. analysts, music society, sports and social club) and diversity