Deputy General Counsel

Nursing & Midwifery Council
About the NMC

Our vision is safe, effective and kind nursing and midwifery practice that improves everyone’s health and wellbeing. As the independent regulator of more than 808,000 nursing and midwifery professionals, we have an important role to play in making this a reality.

About the Team

General Counsel is responsible for ensuring the NMC has the right legal support to help us regulate effectively, meet our legal obligations and manager risk. General Counsel also provides senior professional leadership for the NMC’s legal community.

The General Counsel team delivers strategic legal advice, support and training across the NMC, including to the Executive Board and Council. The legal issues we deal with are wide-ranging, including complex regulatory, public law, equality and human rights, information sharing, safeguarding, whistleblowing, finance and audit, procurement and contracts and employment law issues.

About the role

As Deputy General Counsel you will play a crucial role in overseeing the delivery of legal support, strategic advice, and training on legal issues across the NMC. Working with General Counsel, you will manage a range of high-profile, complex legal issues and will partner with the Assistant Director, Professional Regulation (Legal) to lead and develop a highly effective one-NMC legal service and community.

Key Accountabilities:

Work collaboratively with General Counsel to provide expert legal advice to the NMC (including the Executive Team and Council) on a broad range of complex issues, ensuring the NMC meets all of its legal obligations, manages risk and lives its values. Collaborate with the General Counsel Team, the Assistant Director of Professional Regulation (Legal) and lawyers across the NMC, to:

• Oversee and manage external legal challenges, facilitating learning from these experiences for continuous improvement.
• Procure and oversee the management of effective legal service contracts aligned with the NMC’s strategic objectives.
• Further develop a cohesive NMC legal community, including developing a competency framework for legal teams and ensuring that NMC legal services provision is aligned to the NMC’s objectives and values.
• Ensure that the NMC has in place an effective legal learning and development programme and legal horizon scanning process.
• You will need to build and maintain strong relationships with internal and external stakeholders and provide compelling leadership within the team and the wider legal community.

About You:

• Educated to degree level with a degree in Law or equivalent and a professional legal qualification. Substantial leadership experience of working in a high-profile, complex environment, with cultural leadership and transformation skills.
• In-depth understanding of how legal issues impact organisations with the ability to anticipate and proactively manage complex, high profile legal risks and issues.
• Skilled in understanding and responding to different perspectives with a focus on cultural leadership and transformation. Able to think innovatively and critically, to develop legal strategy and objectives and to develop legal teams and services.
• High professional ethics, integrity, and leadership presence. Excellent judgment, analytical skills, interpersonal, communication, and presentation skills, with the ability to take a cross-organisational perspective.
• Proven track record of building and maintaining strategic relationships and working in partnership. Excellent people leadership skills and the ability to motivate, develop, and hold diverse teams accountable.
• A strong commitment to NMC values and equality, diversity and inclusion, and to developing a culture of learning in the NMC’s legal community.

Overview of Opportunity

To continue on our journey of building a one-NMC legal community, we are investing in two senior leadership roles to lead and shape the future of our NMC legal service. Working in partnership, they will ensure we have a high quality, effective legal service provision across the NMC that reflects our regulatory purpose, objectives and values and supports us in achieving our organisational aims and priorities.

Both roles will operate at a senior strategic level, working closely with lawyers from within their own and other legal teams, collaborating with and supporting colleagues from across the organisation. With a strong commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion, they will lead by example, role-modelling the NMC’s values of kindness, fairness, collaboration and ambition and taking a person-centred, resolution-based approach to our regulatory and wider legal work.

The Assistant Director, Professional Regulation, Legal, will work to ensure that colleagues within the Professional Regulation Directorate receive effective legal advice and support to effectively manage and progress our regulatory cases. This will involve taking a strategic, solution-based approach, ensuring that legal teams within the directorate are able to provide effective legal advice, support and advocacy and that they work collaboratively with lawyers from the General Counsel and Policy and Legislation teams to solve complex issues.

The role involves an understanding of, and ability to manage regulatory work at the statutory decision-making stage and in the high court and strong leadership and communication skills.

The Deputy General Counsel will work to ensure that the NMC takes a broad perspective to all of our work, ensuring we proactively meet all of our wider legal obligations and live our organisational values. The role will help to oversee the NMC’s litigation and other forms of legal challenge and support others in managing high-risk, often high-profile issues arising from our regulatory and corporate functions. The role will ensure that the NMC has in place an effective legal horizon-scanning process as well as other processes to enable us to report on and learn from risks and issues arising from our regulatory functions. The role will also ensure we have in place a highly effective legal learning and development programme for the whole legal community.

Strong collaboration between these roles is paramount, as is an ability to take a solution-based approach, working to ensure that legal resources are deployed in the most effective way possible. While each role has their own responsibilities and accountabilities, both will support the NMC’s General Counsel in managing the NMC’s legal risk and providing professional leadership for the NMC’s legal community. Working together, they will work to shape the future of the NMC’s legal services, including our relationships with our external legal service providers. Their shared aim will be to support the NMC in achieving its statutory purpose, meeting its wider legal obligations, and to developing a one-NMC legal community which has at its heart the NMC’s values, including a strong commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion.

We encourage you to review the Assistant Director, Professional Regulation Legal advert and we would welcome applications from you for both roles.

Benefits:

• 30 days annual leave – plus eight days paid bank holidays
• Enhanced Pension Contributions via our attractive Pension Scheme – with a basic 8% employer contribution as standard which increases up to 14% with optional added Employee Contributions
• Life Assurance – 4 x current salary
• Hybrid/Flexible working policies
• Enhanced Maternity and Paternity Leave
• 24 Hours Employee Assistance Programme
• Cycle to Work Scheme
• Perkbox membership
• Subsidised restaurant in our Portland Place office
• Season ticket loans

About Us

Our core role is to regulate. First, we promote high education and professional standards for nurses and midwives across the UK, and nursing associates in England. Second, we maintain the register of professionals eligible to practise. Third, we investigate concerns about nurses, midwives and nursing associates – something that affects a tiny minority of professionals each year. We believe in giving professionals the chance to address concerns, but we’ll always take action when needed.

To regulate well, we support our professions and the public. We create resources and guidance that are useful throughout people’s careers, helping them to deliver our standards in practice and address new challenges. We also support people involved in our investigations, and we’re increasing our visibility so people feel engaged and empowered to shape our work.

Regulating and supporting our professions allows us to influence health and social care. We share intelligence from our regulatory activities and work with our partners to support workforce planning and sector-wide decision making. We use our voice to speak up for a healthy and inclusive working environment for our professions.

Check out our NMC LinkedIn page here for an insight into the NMC, our vacancies and the world of healthcare regulation.

Additional Information

Please note, if we receive a high level of applications, we may choose to close this advert early. We encourage you to complete your application as soon as possible to avoid disappointment.

Our Pay Policy

It is expected that staff new to the NMC will ordinarily be appointed to the bottom of the relevant pay band. However in exceptional circumstances . click apply for full job details