Senior Planning Manager - Strategic Land

Cobalt is working with an established and well-backed property business looking to appoint a Senior Planning Manager to take a leading role across its strategic land portfolio. This is a broad, hands-on position within a lean and experienced team. The successful candidate will have significant autonomy across a portfolio of residential-led strategic sites, combining planning strategy and promotion with involvement in new opportunities and acquisitions.

The Role

Working closely with the senior leadership team, you will take responsibility for planning across a varied portfolio of strategic land opportunities throughout the wider South East and East of England.

Responsibilities will include:

• Leading planning strategy and promotion across strategic residential sites.
• Monitoring emerging Local Plans and identifying opportunities and risks across the portfolio.
• Providing planning advice and due diligence on potential acquisitions.
• Preparing Local Plan representations, planning statements and other submissions.
• Managing planning applications and appeals through to determination.
• Appointing and managing external planning, technical and specialist consultants.
• Representing projects through public consultation, planning committees and stakeholder engagement.
• Building relationships with local authorities, landowners, communities and other stakeholders.
• Working alongside the wider team to understand planning risk, development potential and commercial strategy.
• Remaining genuinely hands-on with projects rather than solely managing external advisers.

The Candidate

We are looking for an experienced planning professional with a strong background in strategic residential development.

You will ideally:

• Have significant strategic land and residential planning experience.
• Understand the Local Plan and strategic site promotion process.
• Be comfortable personally preparing representations, statements and planning submissions.
• Have experience across applications, appeals and public consultation.
• Be confident managing multidisciplinary consultant teams.
• Understand the relationship between planning strategy, land and commercial value.
• Be MRTPI qualified or have equivalent experience.
• Be proactive, autonomous and comfortable working within a smaller, entrepreneurial environment.

Candidates could come from a strategic land promoter, housebuilder or planning consultancy, provided they have the strategic planning experience and commercial mindset required to operate client-side.

This is an opportunity to join a growing business where the successful individual will have genuine influence over its strategic land portfolio. Longer term, there is scope to take on greater responsibility and potentially progress towards leading the planning function as the business expands.

The position will involve regular office attendance alongside travel to sites and meetings across the region.

Please get in touch with me (Kate) to discuss and understand more about the role. If you do not hear back within two weeks, please assume that your application has been unsuccessful, but we will retain your details on file for future roles.

When applying to any role through Cobalt, your CV will never be shared with a client without your prior consent. Apply in confidence below or get in touch with me for a confidential discussion about the position via kpm@cobaltrecruitment.com.