Senior Policy Advisor for Recall Policy
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Youth Justice and Offender Policy
The Youth Justice and Offender Policy Directorate is recruiting permanently for a Senior Policy Advisor for Recall Policy. This campaign is open to current civil servants on level transfer and suitable candidates on promotion.
Location:
Successful candidates will have the option to be based at one of the following locations:
- 102 Petty France, London
- 5 Wellington Place, Leeds
Occasional travel between the two locations may be required. We offer a hybrid working model, allowing for a balance between remote work and time spent in your base location (102 Petty France or 5 Wellington Place Leeds).
Ways of Working
At the MoJ we believe and promote alternative ways of working, these roles are available as:
- Full-time, part-time or the option to job share
- Flexible working patterns
If we receive applications from more suitable candidates than we have vacancies for at this time, we may hold suitable applicants on a reserve list for 12 months, and future vacancies requiring the same skills and experience could be offered to candidates on the reserve list without a new competition.
We welcome and encourage applications from everyone, including groups currently underrepresented in our workforce and pride ourselves as being an employer of choice. To find out more about how we champion diversity and inclusion in the workplace, visit: https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/ministry-of-justice/about/equality-and-diversity
Salary
Existing Civil Servants will have their salary calculated in accordance with the Department’s pay on transfer / pay on promotion rules.
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ)
MoJ is the largest government department, employing over 90,000 people with a budget of approximately £10 billion. Each year, millions of people use our services across the UK - including at 500 courts and tribunals, and 133 prisons in England and Wales.
Further information can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/ministry-of-justice
The Work of the Prison Demand and Release Unit
The Prison Demand and Release (PDR) Policy Team, which is situated in the Youth Justice and Offender Policy (YJOP) Directorate, plays a crucial role in addressing the prison capacity challenge We work ly with HMPPS, other policy teams including the Female Offenders and Probation, in addition to legal and analytical teams, to give ministers robust advice.
This team’s remit includes considering steps that could be taken to address the growing prison recall population. In the past year, this work has included delivering landmark reforms to recall via secondary and primary legislation. The growing recall population continues to be a key part of the prison capacity challenge and our work to address this challenge is ongoing. It is an area which has high ministerial and stakeholder attention.
Within this context, we are looking for a motivated policy professional to join a welcoming and supportive team. The role is fast paced, but with the opportunity for detailed policy work, intellectually challenging and exciting, and will give the successful candidate the chance to work on an area which will make a real difference to how offenders are dealt with by the criminal justice system for years to come.
Job description
We are looking for a motivated policy professional to join a welcoming and supportive team to help address the challenge of the growing recall population. The role is fast paced, intellectually challenging and exciting, and will give the successful candidate the opportunity to work on an area which will make a real difference to how offenders are dealt with by the criminal justice system for years to come.
This is a busy team that receives a lot of interest from senior officials and ministers and is a fantastic opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to the prison capacity challenge.
The job holder will be required to work flexibly to respond to ministerial priorities. Although the focus of the role will evolve, you will initially work to provide critical policy support to help monitor the impacts of our recall reforms within the Sentencing Act, as well as undertaking work to identify and develop non-legislative policy options for further reforms to the recall process.
This will involve significant collaboration with policy teams across the MoJ, operational partners in HMPPS and external stakeholders as well as providing clear advice to Ministers.
Key responsibilities will include:
Policy development: Developing innovative approaches to complex policy challenges. You will draw on different sources of evidence and data to inform your work and demonstrate effective problem-solving approaches.
Advice, briefing and correspondence: Ensuring Ministers, senior leaders, Parliamentarians and stakeholders are given clear, well-researched and timely advice on live issues and areas of concern. This work is likely to include oral and written briefings, parliamentary questions and correspondence and feeding a prison demand and release perspective into wider work across MoJ and other government departments.
Project oversight – Scoping, planning and managing your work through project management techniques: managing risks, issues and dependencies and monitoring and progress. This can include reviews and research-led projects
Stakeholder relations: Maintaining and owning relationships with a wide range of key stakeholders within the MoJ/HMPPS, across government and within the third sector.
Skills and Experience
Essential:
- Strong ability to work collaboratively across teams and confidently represent government with external stakeholders and engage with a wide range of views.
- Ability to manage competing priorities and adjust to changing demands, prioritising work accordingly.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to tailor written work to different audiences and explain complex or technical issues clearly to non-specialists.
- Strong influencing skills, including the confidence to provide appropriate challenge constructively and effectively.
- Creative problem-solving skills and the ability to propose innovative solutions to challenges.
Ability to work - ly with operational colleagues, analysts and lawyers to understand the data, the legal framework and unpick tricky policy issues and develop solutions at pace.
- You can demonstrate that you can quickly understand complex information from a range of sources and can identify how it fits into the wider picture
Desirable:
- Experience of working on criminal justice
- Experience working with data
Candidates applying from HMPPS should note that the Ministry of Justice does not have the same conditions of employment as HMPPS. It is the candidate’s responsibility to ensure they are aware of the terms and conditions they will adopt should they be successful.
The MoJ is proud to be Level 3 Disability Confident. Disability Confident is the approach through which we offer guaranteed interviews for all people with disabilities meeting the minimum criteria for the advertised role as set out in the job description.
Application process
You will be assessed against the Civil service success profiles framework.
You must ensure that any evidence submitted as part of your application, including your CV, statement of suitability and behaviour examples, are truthful and factually accurate. Please note that plagiarism can include presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own.
Experience
You will be asked to provide a CV during the application process in order to assess any demonstrable experience, career history and achievements that are relevant to the role.
You will also be asked to upload a Statement of Suitability of no more than 500 words stating what you would bring to the role with reference to the Skills and Experience, it should demonstrate their suitability for the role in line with the role job description and suggested skills
Behaviours
During the application process you will be asked to provide an example of how you have met the following behaviour (see Annex A for more information):
- Communicating and Influencing
Please also refer to the CS Behaviours framework for more details at this grade:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/717275/CS_Behaviours_2018.pdf
Should we receive a large number of applications, we will sift primarily on the lead behaviour of Communicating and Influencing. Successful applicants will then be invited to an interview, testing both behaviours and strengths.
Candidates invited to Interview
Please note that interviews will be carried out remotely.
During the panel interview, you will be asked behaviour-based questions to explore in detail what you are capable of, and your motivations relevant to the job role.
- Seeing the Big Picture
- Delivering at Pace
- Making Effective Decisions
Interviews are expected to take place in mid to late July 2026
Contact information
Please do get in touch if you would like to know more about the role or what it is like working in our team: Alliyah Gordon – [email protected]
Annex A - The STAR method
Using the STAR method can help you give examples of relevant experience that you have. It allows you to set the scene, show what you did, and how you did it, and explain the overall outcome.
Situation - Describe the situation you found yourself in. You must describe a specific event or situation. Be sure to give enough detail for the job holder to understand.
W
- are you?
Who was t- with you?
- What had happened?
Task - The job holder will want to understand what you tried to achieve from the situation you found yourself in.
- What was the task that you had to complete and why?
- What did you have to achieve?
Actions - What did you do? The job holder will be looking for information on what you did, how you did it and why. Keep the focus on you. What specific steps did you take and what was your contribution? Remember to include how you did it, and the behaviours you used. Try to use “I” rather than “we” to explain your actions that lead to the result. Be careful not to take credit for something that you did not do.
Results - Don’t be shy about taking credit for your behaviour. Quote specific facts and figures. Explain how the outcome benefitted the organisation or your area. Make the outcomes easily understandable.
- What results did the actions produce?
- What did you achieve through your actions and did you meet your goals?
- Was it a successful outcome? If not, what did you learn from the experience?
Keep the situation and task parts brief. Concentrate on the action and the result. If the result was not entirely successful describe what you learned from this and what you would do differently next time. Make sure you focus on your strengths.
