Senior Road Safety Auditor

• Our Senior Road Safety Auditors play a vital role in assessing and improving the safety of road schemes delivered by Somerset Council and third parties. They conduct road safety audits to assess the potential problems and make recommendations on how to eliminate or minimise the potential for collisions or accidents to occur. By applying advanced auditing techniques and their extensive experience, senior auditors help shape policies and strategies that contribute to road safety improvements.

  • This role offers hybrid working, allowing you to work either from home or from one of our offices.
  • 30 days’ annual leave (plus bank holidays).
  • Permanent 37-hour position.

Somerset is a great place to live, work and play, boasting plenty of beautiful sites – in villages and market towns – with a rich heritage of history and legend. Infrastructure is at the heart of our ambitions to support productivity and innovation, and we host the largest infrastructure project in Europe, Hinkley Point C. Highways play an essential role in our ambitions – we are a progressive Council that is transforming our highway services to significantly reduce carbon emissions. We’re a rural county with the tenth largest road network in the country. As the Highways Authority, we look after 6,600km of road, 2,000 bridges, 900km of ditches, 120,000 gullies and 52,000 streetlights. This network is growing too, with 9km of new highway every year, 9,500 planning applications every year and 700+ live development sites at any one time. We have over £50m of highway improvement projects in progress and planned involving both major multi-million-pound highway projects and more modest improvements in areas such as Safety, Active Travel, Bus Infrastructure, Rural Mobility, and Electric Vehicle projects. We require a range of roles to support design and delivery of these capital projects, to work with third parties in the delivery of works to both create new and improve the public highway, and support maintenance of our extensive highway assets.

We’re working to improve the lives of people in Somerset – and you’ll be a key part of that. Reporting to the Principal Road Safety Auditor in the Development Engineering Team, your day-to-day work as a Senior Road Safety Auditor will involve:

• Dealing unaided with complex and controversial design stage road safety audit which may include major highway improvements being progressed by the County Council, or major highway works associated with developer led schemes.
• On less complex schemes, acting as the Lead in a Road Safety Audit team to assess the potential road safety problems associated with completed new road or road improvement schemes by examination of the works, driver behaviour and analysis of reported accidents or near misses using a combination of specialist technical knowledge and experience in road safety engineering and collision analysis. Make recommendations on how to eliminate or minimise potential for collisions or accidents to occur.
• Assessing specific elements of major and complex submitted highway scheme designs against documented standards using a combination of specialist technical knowledge and experience in road safety engineering and compile technical reports of findings with suggestions on how to achieve required standards.
• Assessing, against documented standards, the safety of school pupils walking identified routes along the public highway to school in response to claims against the highway authority of such a route being unsafe.
• Formulation of updated technical design standards, specification, guidance literature, procedures and targets.

We offer ongoing support, training and guidance to help you be the best you can be. But it is essential that you have the following:

• Good general education with sound mathematical and English standards and acquired knowledge of HNC standard in a relevant field.
• Demonstrates experience, application and familiarity in highways, traffic and/or road safety engineering or highway design.
• Evidence of formal Road Safety training as specified in the latest DMRB guidance ‘Road Safety Audit’, e. any structured training which covers aspects of road safety engineering, casualty reduction, and road safety policy and strategy review and to provide copies of relevant attendance certificates.
• Good level of knowledge of relevant legislation, standards and codes of practice, and able to demonstrate application of and familiarity with Road Safety Audit and Collision Investigation topics.

We’re proud to be here for the people of Somerset. And that means everyone in Somerset. An important part of this is ensuring that we are as diverse and inclusive as the people and communities we serve.

We welcome applications from a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences to enrich our team. You can always contact the hiring manager for a chat if there’s anything you want to talk about before you apply.

We are proud to offer an environment that is supportive and rewarding, working as part of a team who are passionate about the work they do to improve the lives of people in Somerset.

We offer great training and development opportunities, with supportive management. As well as this, we have some fantastic employee benefits available:

• We promote a healthy work-life balance and offer flexible working arrangements wherever possible, including working from home.
• Generous annual leave allowance, with the opportunity to purchase additional leave
• Staff discounts in gyms.
• Employee Assistance for the times you may need some support and a variety of employee wellbeing services.
• Auto enrolment onto our generous Pension Scheme and optional pension enhancement through our Additional Voluntary Contribution scheme.
• A Flexible Benefits Scheme via salary sacrifice to obtain a cycle for work and health screenings.
• My Staff Shop offering discounts in shops, online shopping, restaurants, cinema tickets, insurance benefits and more

The salary for the role is Grade 10, ranging from £36,124 to £40,476 per annum.

For an informal chat about the role, you can contact martin.shattock@somerset.gov.uk quoting the job reference.

If you have everything you need, just hit the apply button. We can’t wait to hear from you.