Job Description
Temporary Public Sector Administration Role suitable for someone with a secretarial background and a passion for excellent customer service.
Temporary contract till the end of March 2026, or for 7 months from start date to cover maternity leave.
£14.86/hr - 37hrs/week
Passionate about providing excellent customer service? Brook Street are currently recruiting for a Sustainability Support Officer, Executive Officer level, to work for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, DEFRA, based in either Bristol, Newcastle Upon Tyne or York.
Full-time role working 37 hours per week, Monday-Friday, 9 - 5, can be flexible to a certain degree.
Office based for the training, then moving on to 3 days a week in the office. This could increase, as required, for further training or if the business needs dictates.
Possible travel between sites on a few occasions.
No parking on any of the sites.
Location- Lancaster House, Newcastle Upon Tyne, Horizon House, Bristol or Foss House, York
Rate of pay £14.86/hr
Temporary contract till end of March 2026
About The Role:
This role sits within the Defra group Sustainability Centre of Expertise, which provides services across Defra group's 34 organisations. The team provides a range of essential services. This includes Setting, developing, maintaining and overseeing the implementation of the Defra group sustainability strategy.
This role will provide admin support services across the teams ensuring that they are able to react and respond to changes affecting the function quickly and efficiently.
Main responsibilities will include but not be limited to:
1. Providing business support along with general administration tasks
2. Overseeing financial support, having oversight of purchase orders (POs) and other transactions
3. Raising purchase order requests with the appropriate team, raise and track progress to completion
4. Maintaining and improving their intranet and Sustainability Hub information
5. Delivering the secretariat service to several cross-Defra and cross-Government forums, such as the Sustainability Leadership Group and the Government Chief Sustainability Officers' Group.
6. Creating agendas and pulling the items together
7. Arranging meetings, minute taking, summarising of the meetings and dealing with the action points
8. Collection and analysing of data
9. Some travel to other sites possible, once every 3 to 4 months
10. Under the government's transparency agenda, prepare various transparency data sets for first review and liaise with stakeholders and customers to resolve any queries and discrepancies, ready for publication on GOV.UK
11. Monitoring team mailboxes and calendars as well as allocate queries appropriately
12. Providing limited Personal Assistant support to the Head of Sustainability Culture and Reporting team
13. Providing excellent customer service
Skills Required:
14. Excellent customer service, confident to operate at all levels and be able to escalate to senior colleagues, where appropriate
15. Be able to work independently and as part of a team
16. Effective time management, with experience of working to tight deadlines
17. Excellent written and verbal skills
18. Computer literate in Microsoft suite applications, such as Excel, Word and PowerPoint
19. Attention to detail and use own initiative
20. Data entry and analysis - extracting data from reports
21. Administration experience essential
22. Financial experience desireable
Full training will given but you must have full working knowledge of Microsoft products, especially Excel.
Candidates applying must be able to pass a clear Basic DBS check and provide proof of Right to Work in the UK. You will also need to provide either reference details and/or evidence for education etc for the last 3 years.
The interviews will take place via Teams and you will be expected to demonstrate how your skills match those required and answer one or two competency-based questions, see behaviours below.
Behaviours
23. Seeing the Big Picture
24. Communicating and Influencing
25. Managing a Quality Service
26. Working Together
So, if you are looking for a glimpse into the world of the Public Sector, then this could be the opportunity for you.