Development Manager – Social Housing

Final date to receive applications: 25 January 2026

Department: Pride in Place

Location: Torbay Council

Compensation: £51,356 - £54,495 / year

This is an exciting time to join our Strategic Housing & Delivery Service. We are looking for a passionate, driven, housing delivery specialist. Someone that has a social housing delivery background that can help us unlock stalled sites, acquire land and buildings, and deliver newbuild council homes, all of which will help us sustainably and consistently grow our affordable housing delivery rates over coming years.

Above all, though, we are looking for a dedicated individual that can help us to help the residents of Torbay to secure somewhere to live that is good quality, and affordable. We are looking for a creative thinker; a problem solver; and someone that can help us use every tool at our disposal to deliver the homes our residents need.

Torbay is an incredible place to live and work. With stunning coastline, rolling hills, great transport links, and access to a huge range of facilities both within our area and beyond. The English Riviera is a fantastic place to put down roots.

We are, however, in a housing crisis. Too many households find themselves unable to find or afford a home for private rent; even fewer households find home ownership within their reach. As a result, demand for social housing is high, but with relatively little new supply coming through the planning system in recent years, local households are finding it increasingly difficult to secure a good quality home that they can afford.

And without access to sustainable housing, key local employers struggle to secure the staff they need to thrive and grow.

We are leading the way on a range of really exciting and innovative programmes to help solve the situation. We have an established Town Centre Regeneration Programme, which has now secured its first planning consents at Union Square in Torquay and the former Crossways Centre in Paignton (the latter of which will see the Council deliver all 91-units of Extra Care Housing, all for Social Rent), which we need to get to site in the coming months.

Work is now also underway to unlock the next two sites in these areas, which have potential to deliver hundreds of homes in the coming years, with further sites to follow.

We are also now well underway with our innovative ‘Hotels to Homes’ initiative (the first site of which has very recently completed), which is part of our wider Accommodation Repurposing Programme. This is a truly exciting opportunity that we’re pioneering here in Torbay to take dilapidated, and often, derelict former hotels, to convert, repurpose and redevelop them into modern, high quality social housing that it fit for the 21st Century.

What we have achieved in the last 2 years is fantastic, and we’re beginning to see a change in the volume of future supply. But we’ve reached the point where our team needs to grow, to enable us to invest in more projects, and deliver much-needed growth.

We need to encourage developers to bring forward good quality, sustainable housing schemes on brownfield sites that can be viable. We need to identify more creative opportunities to deliver the homes that our local households need. And we need to maximise the supply of affordable homes generated through the planning system to support the Registered Provider sector in Torbay, too.

To do all of this, we need people to join us to help create and deliver innovative capital solutions that address our complex geographical and strategic constraints that make the most the opportunities we do have available. We also need people who can help us become part of the solution, by helping us deliver our Housing Delivery Plan, with a focus on our ambitious (and growing) programme of direct ‘council housing’ delivery.

This post meets the requirements of the Public Services Network (PSN) and therefore will require a Basic Criminal Record Check. This will show any unspent convictions and conditional cautions.

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