Planning Lead
Company: Costain Group
Role summary
Planning Lead is a full-time role at Costain Group in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, United Kingdom (hybrid). Posted 2026-10-22. Experience level: 10+.
- Job title
- Planning Lead
- Company
- Costain Group
- Location
- Newcastle upon Tyne, England, United Kingdom
- Work arrangement
- hybrid
- Employment type
- full-time
- Category
- Logistics & Warehousing
- Experience level
- 10+
- Date posted
- 2026-10-22
You have a fantastic opportunity to join Costain on a major 15-year infrastructure project for Northumbrian Water, giving you long-term stability and a chance to shape critical national utilities. It’s an ideal move if you want to lead strategic planning for large-scale construction programs and be a central voice in a multi-million pound framework.
Job description
Costain have won extensive work across the water sector to support the AMP 8 investment cycle. We have been appointed by Northumbrian Water to the Living Water Enterprise to help shape and deliver its strategic infrastructure upgrade programme with contracts valued up to c.£670m to Costain over 15 years. We are now looking for an experienced Planning Lead to join the Framework team.
As a key member of the Delivery Team, the successful applicant will be aligned to the new AMP8 projects and will be able to demonstrate experience of integrating and managing schedules across large scale civil engineering programmes.
You will also need to demonstrate experience of working across multi-disciplinary programme teams covering every aspect of project delivery from design through procurement, construction, and commissioning.
The successful candidate is expected to develop a strategic overview of the programme and ownership of any cross-project integration, schedule change management, and gain an understanding of underlying risks and opportunities which might impact the delivery of programme outcomes.
Responsibilities
Set the planning strategy for complex projects and clearly communicate this through the wider team
Support the planning, development, and maintenance of high-quality schedules against the agreed project scope to deliver the AMP8 programme outcomes
Support the establishment of robust systems, processes, and procedures to support the AMP8 works across the programme and supply chain
Report the current Programme/Project position in line with the governance, process and procedures to include Risk, EV, Change Management and Cost
Maintain an overview of the AMP8 Programme to provide critical path analysis and identify opportunities and risks
Demonstrate the establishment and application of governance utilising business systems and commercial, risk and schedule reporting processes
Manage programmes with respect to change, slippage and mitigation
Develop a proactive, collaborative open relationship with the Customer particularly in open reporting and evaluation of project data
Develop, manage, and maintain an integrated plan across the entire programme of works to schedule deadlines, manage dependencies, and coordinate the optimal use of resources
Support the establishment of common procedures, systems, and protocols, and ensure compliance with all applicable policies, procedures, and standards
Consolidate data from across the programme to develop monthly reports on progress, benefits and performance against KPIs, in support of framework earned value metrics, performance tables and balanced scorecard
Ensure that suitably qualified and experienced planning resources are provided to projects in a timely manner, capable of driving collaborative planning
Knowledge, Skills, and Experience
Extensive experience of schedule management on large scale civil engineering/infrastructure projects ideally for a tier 1 contractor or client-side
Significant planning experience in the water industry (preferred) covering large scale infrastructure programmes or experience in non-water large scale programmes
Extensive experience of multi-project integration
Project management experience, particularly of complex Major Infrastructure Programmes covering: Risk, Cost, Change Management, Earned Value, Reporting
Expert on the use of P6 within large-scale project/programmes and critical path tracing and analysis
Scheduling/Reporting experience within NEC contract framework
Excellent communication skills with the ability to negotiate and influence key stakeholders
Experience of maintaining performance and contractual baselines, producing critical path analysis on fully resourced and cost loaded project plans, monitoring changes, and reporting on early warnings and variations
Strong leadership skills with experience in leading teams and advising senior colleagues to enable delivery of our business goals
Qualifications
HNC/HND, degree qualified or experience in a planning related discipline
#LI-JA1
Costain helps to improve people’s lives with integrated, leading edge, smart infrastructure solutions across the UK’s energy, water, transportation and defence markets. We help our clients improve their business performance by increasing capacity, improving customer service, safeguarding security, enhancing resilience, decarbonising and delivering increased efficiency. Our vision is to be the UK’s leading smart infrastructure solutions company. We will achieve this by focusing on blue chip clients whose major spending plans are underpinned by strategic national needs, regulatory commitments, legislation or essential performance requirements. We offer our clients leading edge solutions that are digitally optimised through the following five services which cover the whole lifecycle of their assets: future-shaping strategic consultancy; consultancy and advisory; digital technology solutions; asset optimisation and complex programme delivery. Our culture and values underpin everything we do.
Costain appreciate the time and effort taken when applying for one of our positions but, due to the high volume of responses, we are unable to provide individual feedback on candidates at application phase.
We do share individual feedback following an interview .
A Disability Confident employer will generally offer an interview to any applicant that disclose they have a disability and meets the minimum criteria for the job as defined by the employer.
It is important to note that in certain recruitment situations such as high-volume, seasonal and high-peak times, the employer may wish to limit the overall numbers of interviews offered to both disabled people and non-disabled people.
For more details please go to the Disability Confident website:
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/disability-confident-campaign