Join Carmarthenshire County Council
Carmarthenshire County Council is looking for a visionary Director of Social Services & Housing to lead transformative change. In this strategic role, you'll manage social services, safeguarding, and housing strategies, ensuring compliance and efficiency. We seek an experienced, innovative leader with a proven track record in senior roles. Join us to make a positive impact in a forward-thinking local authority dedicated to excellence and continuous improvement.
We are proud to share that our department is in a strong regulatory position. We are committed to a significant transformation agenda, driven by our creative and innovative workforce, to meet the predicted and evolving demands of our community.
The department encompasses a wide range of critical services designed to support the well-being and development of our residents.
Below is an overview of the key services:
Children and Families Services offer a wide range of support to enable children and young people to have the best possible start in life, working with families via universal early years support in our children’s centres, information, advice and assistance, right through to statutory intervention to protect children from harm.
Integrated Services deliver community-based Health & Social Care services across the Local Authority and Hywel Dda University Health Board for Older People and People with a Physical Disability or Sensory Impairment. This integration emphasises collaborative working between health and social care to improve well-being for individuals. A joint venture with Hywel Dda University Health Board, this division aims to provide seamless, integrated care to our community through collaborative efforts and shared resources.
Carmarthenshire's wholly owned LATC Llesiant Delta Wellbeing is a key partner in delivering community based health and social care services. It provides pro-active technology-based care, Information, Advice and Assistance (IAA), acute hospital ward based IAA, rapid falls response in the community, and out of hours services. Delta is recognised for it's innovative approach, and contribution to improving social care services in Carmarthenshire.
Council Strategy and Policy Leadership: Support the preparation and delivery of the Council Strategy, working with the Chief Executive, Cabinet, and CMT to ensure effective policymaking and implementation across all departments.
Leadership of Social Services: Oversee all Adult and Children’s Social Services, including safeguarding, mental health, disabilities, and older people's services, ensuring alignment with agreed plans and commissioning intentions.
Safeguarding and Review Processes: Ensure effective statutory safeguarding processes, including SUSRs, MAPFs, and the application of lessons learned from practice reviews.
Housing Strategy: Lead the development and implementation of sustainable housing strategies involving council, private, and third-sector provision.
Commissioned and In-House Care: Manage the commissioning and delivery of residential, fostering, day, and home care services, ensuring quality, value for money, and market sustainability.
Service Vision and Engagement: Develop a clear vision for service improvement, ensuring high standards and strong engagement with service users and stakeholders.
Collaboration and Professional Development: Engage in national networks (WLGA, ADSS Cymru, etc.) to promote professional leadership, development, and best practice sharing.
Scrutiny and Performance Monitoring: Monitor departmental performance through scrutiny, ensuring achievement of objectives and efficient use of resources.
Strategic Planning and Performance: Lead the development of strategies, policies, business plans, and performance reports within Council targets and resources.
Early Intervention and Access: Lead the development of advice, information, prevention, and assessment services to ensure appropriate access to social care for users and carers.
Governance and Standards: Ensure strong governance and practice standards across Adult and Children’s Services, with regular reporting to Members and CMT.
Integrated Working and Partnerships: Promote integrated working with Health and other partners regionally and locally for better outcomes.
Oversight of Llesiant Delta Wellbeing: Ensure the LATC delivers outcomes aligned with shareholder expectations and business plans.
Strategic Alignment: Ensure Social Services and Housing ambitions align with the Council's overall vision and transformation agenda.
Financial Management: Manage budgets effectively, supporting cost-efficient service development and identifying savings and pressures.
Customer-Centred Services: Promote a culture of partnership and customer focus, incorporating feedback into service planning and delivery.
Closing date: Mid-Day 9 June 2025
Shortlisting: 18 June 2025
Assessment Centre: 24 June 2025
Appointments Panel ’A’: 2 July 2025
Both the assessment centre and appointments panel will be held at County Hall, Carmarthen, SA31 1JP.
Welcome to Carmarthenshire ‐ one of the safest, most beautiful, and vibrant counties in Wales. It is a county often described as a microcosm of Wales with a sweeping coastline, historic market towns and post‐industrial regeneration in increasingly vibrant urban towns.
Carmarthenshire remains amongst some of the safest places to live in the country and crime levels are low. Attractions in the county include the Ffos Las racecourse, Blue flag beaches including Wales’s largest stretch of golden sand at Cefn Sidan, numerous golf courses, Parc y Scarlets Stadium, The National Botanical Gardens for Wales, the Millennium Coastal Path and the new Tourism Attractor facility at Pendine Seafront.
Over the past two years, significant progress has been made in delivering regeneration projects designed to provide sustainable benefits to the wider community. These projects aim to revitalise and support economic growth within the Town Centre.
Our Health Services have ambitious plans to develop new models of care that will transform our services across both acute and community services. We have more than 9,300 council owned homes and through prudent financial management now have plans to build more homes to meet local and specialist housing need. We are currently developing a very exciting and ambitious multi-million-pound project, the Pentre Awel development, which will create jobs and housing as well as world-class medical research and health care facilities.
In Carmarthenshire we are renowned for our commitment to delivering exceptional Social Services and quality Housing. We pride ourselves on our innovative approaches and our dedication to fostering a supportive and empowering environment for both our staff and those we serve.
For the right person, this is a great career opportunity. We are incredibly ambitious for Carmarthenshire, and this is your chance to take on a leadership role that will be vital to seeing good intentions translate into great outcomes.
For a fantastic place to live, work and visit ‐ look no further than Carmarthenshire!
Yours faithfully,
Cllr Darren Price
Leader of the Council
Carmarthenshire is one of the largest authorities in Wales and prides itself on its bold strategic ambitions and vision. As one of the largest employers in the County, maintaining our excellent reputation for delivering first class services to our residents and being the Employer of choice is incredibly important to us.
The world has changed significantly in these last five years, but some things remain the same. Carmarthenshire County Council’s greatest strength is still its people. We still work together and look out for each other, becoming stronger and more resilient than ever. We still strive every day to be the Council our communities need and expect. Your job is to help us use these strengths, see the opportunities, and sharpen our focus to ensure our residents can thrive. When we say we want to do more for our residents, we mean it.
Our dedication to ensuring the safety and welfare of our children and young people, providing affordable quality homes, and helping people live independently is at the core of everything we do. This role is crucial to our journey toward excellence, and you'll be building on strong foundations. As the Director of Social Services and Housing, reporting directly to the Chief Executive, you will oversee innovative services that will promote our vision. This is an opportunity to join an incredibly collaborative senior team and engage in innovative thinking across our diverse and complex portfolios.
As an experienced senior leader, you will drive change in social services and housing. You'll identify opportunities to improve standards and work collaboratively with partners to find solutions. Your strategic problem-solving skills will ensure the quality provision, creating a supportive environment for residents and families. We look forward to the positive impact you will bring.
Yours Faithfully,
Wendy Walters
The Council vision is summed up in the following statement:
Developing Carmarthenshire Together: One Council; One Vision; One Voice
Our well-being objectives are focused on: Enabling our children and young people to have the best possible start in life (Start Well); Enabling our residents to live and age well (Live & Age Well), Enabling our communities and environment to be healthy, safe and prosperous (Prosperous Communities), to further modernise and develop as a resilient and efficient Council (Our Council).
Read more in the Council’s Corporate Strategy
Work is currently underway in terms of regenerating the county, which will include the creation of new jobs via six major transformational projects, providing an economy within Carmarthenshire which is at 90% of the UK average GVA level. We are one of four local authorities in the £1.3b Swansea Bay City Region, and the City Deal will create 9,000 jobs over a 15-year period with Carmarthenshire seeing huge economic benefits in terms of digital infrastructure, smart manufacturing, energy, and wellbeing. Moreover, our rural communities are also integral to our local growth and exciting new interventions, such as the Ten Towns initiative will revitalise these areas.
Working differently over the past five years has taught us much at Carmarthenshire. By investing in our digital infrastructure and leveraging the talents of our committed workforce, we have proven that we can deliver exceptional public services with agility, including remote working. Our Hybrid Working Guidance embraces this evolution, and we welcome applications from individuals who wish to enjoy the unique experiences Carmarthenshire has to offer while working in a flexible, hybrid manner. In this senior role, the successful candidate will need to expertly balance the advantages of hybrid working with the necessity of maintain a strong, visible presence within the workplace. As a key strategic and operational leader, your ability to be present and actively engaged in the daily activities while also effectively managing remote working will be crucial to our collective success.
We have 75 County Councillors representing 51 community wards. The current political administration of the council is made up as follows:
GRŴP PLAID CYMRU / PARTY OF WALES GROUP - 38
LABOUR GROUP – 21
INDEPENDENT GROUP – 11
INDEPENDENT UNAFFILIATED – 5
Our values are at the heart of everything we do. They help us to make the right decision and shape how we work together.
Our behaviours explain what our core values mean in practice. Our behaviours are about HOW we do our work, that’s important because how we work and how we treat others, affects how we deliver services.
Our Behaviours are:
- how we personally act (the ‘how’)
- clearly described (so we can understand them)
- noticeable (we can see or hear them being demonstrated)
Our Behaviours will guide how we work and how we treat others; whatever job you do, in whichever service you work in.
How we work makes a difference - to each other, to our services, to developing Carmarthenshire together.
Our Core Values are:
Working as one team
We recognise that by working together and making constructive connections we can make the best use of our resources for our communities
Focus on our customers
We work to improve the lives of the people in our communities this is our focus and key purpose.
Listen to improve
We will listen and engage with our communities, partners and all stakeholders to inform our improvement plans.
Strive for excellence
We will remain vigilant and ensure that we deliver to the best of our abilities and always explore ways to improve what we do.
Act with Integrity
We will actively think about what is the right thing to do when presented with choices in a work situation.
Take personal responsibility
We will all consider how we support and apply these values so they actively underpin and guide the way we work.
A diverse place to live and work
Carmarthenshire benefits from convenient access to major cities including Swansea, Cardiff and Newport along the M4 corridor as well as Bristol, Birmingham and London to the east. Pembrokeshire’s ports to the west also facilitate easy travel to Ireland.
We take pride in our sweeping coastline which extends from the Burry inlet with views of the Gower Peninsula, as well as miles of golden sands and Blue Flag beaches reaching as far as Pendine in the west. This is accompanied by rolling countryside stretching to our borders with Pembrokeshire, Ceredigion, Powys, Neath Port Talbot and Swansea, skirting the edge of Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons) National Park.
As one of the largest local authorities in Wales, we have spearheaded an ambitious programme of investment and development to facilitate first class services for our residents, businesses and visitors. This includes sporting stadiums including Parc Y Scarlets Stadium, golf courses and Pembrey’s National Closed Road Cycling Circuit. Our visitor attractions include theatre and leisure complexes such as the National Botanic Garden of Wales, Dylan Thomas Boathouse, Burry Port Marina, Millennium Coastal Park, Tywi Valley Path and the Tourism Attractor Project in Pendine. Ongoing developments include Pentre Awel, with Canolfan Pentre Awel set to provide world-class medical research and health care delivery, a range of public healthcare and leisure services. It is therefore unsurprising that Carmarthenshire’s tourism economy is flourishing, generating over £400m a year.
Carmarthenshire is a truly bilingual county, with nearly 73,000 Welsh speakers. Language is an important aspect of our history and culture and we are firmly committed to helping people live, work and access services in their language of choice, using our Language Skills Strategy to support the delivery of the Welsh Language Standards.
Lowest Crime Area
In September 2023 Dyfed Powys Police reported the lowest Crime rates in Wales.
Excellent Schools
We maintain 1 nursery school, 94 primary schools, 12 secondary schools and 1 special school in Carmarthenshire. They provide education for over 27,000 pupils.
House Prices
£194,000 is the average house price for the county.
Universities & Colleges
Carmarthenshire is the home of University of Wales Trinity Saint David and a further education college, Coleg Sir Gâr.
Beaches
From Amroth in the west to Llanelli in the east, the Carmarthenshire coastline stretches for 67 miles.
Historic Places
If history is your thing then Carmarthenshire’ has many ancient castles and historic houses to explore, each with their own rich repertoire of stories to share.
Hospitals
We have two general hospitals located in Carmarthen and Llanelli as well as 2 community hospitals in Amman Valley and Llandovery.
Culture
Home to theatres and cinemas, galleries and museums. You will find a thriving culture.
We want you to enjoy working for Carmarthenshire County Council and for it to be a rewarding experience. Our employees are at the very heart of the services we provide to the community and help us achieve our ambitions. We offer a range of benefits and working arrangements to support employees in their working and personal life.
Employee Benefits
We offer a range of benefits and working arrangements to support employees in their working and personal life.
Working for us
Information about what it’s like to work with us and the lifestyle you can enjoy in Carmarthenshire.
Welsh Language
As an employer, we provide various options for staff to learn or improve their Welsh. We will work hard to support you to achieve the required language level for this post.
Our Mission and Core Values
Our values are important to us and define who we are as an organisation and as an employer.
For an informal discussion, please contact Wendy Walters, Chief Executive, at Carmarthenshire County Council on 01267 224110 or via e-mail at chiefexecutive@carmarthenshire.gov.uk
