Job overview

Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is seeking a highly skilled and proactive Senior Estates Manager to lead our engineering and building services operations, with a strong emphasis on compliance management across the Trust’s estate.

This pivotal role is essential in ensuring that all NHS facilities consistently meet statutory, regulatory, and safety standards—safeguarding patients, staff, and visitors, while enabling the delivery of efficient, reliable, and sustainable healthcare services.

Main duties of the job

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and manage all aspects of estates engineering and building services compliance, including Health & Safety legislation, HTMs, HBNs, COSHH, fire safety, and environmental regulations.

• Develop, implement, and monitor comprehensive maintenance programmes that ensure statutory compliance and mitigate risk.

• Act as an Authorised Person for critical systems such as medical gases and water safety, ensuring operational safety and adherence to regulations.

• Coordinate and oversee compliance-related audits, inspections (e.g., CQC, PLACE), risk assessments, and remedial actions.

• Manage a multidisciplinary estates team and specialist contractors to maintain the highest compliance and quality standards.

• Support capital projects with compliance-driven design advice, ensuring new schemes meet all legal and regulatory requirements.

• Lead emergency response on the on-call rota, addressing compliance-related estates issues promptly and effectively.

• Maintain accurate compliance records and support the preparation of statutory returns and reports.

• Liaise with internal departments, regulators, and external stakeholders to ensure integrated and transparent compliance management.

Working for our organisation

Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust provides hospital services to a growing population of around 700,000 people living across Bedfordshire and the surrounding areas across two busy hospital sites in Bedford and Luton.  Both hospital sites offer key services such as A&E, Obstetrics-led Maternity and Paediatrics. You will be joining a friendly, high performing Trust committed to ensuring the health and wellbeing of staff. As one of the largest NHS Trusts in our region you will have access to a programme of high quality training and development to help you grow your career. The Trust continues to be committed to delivering the best patient care using the best clinical knowledge and technology available.

Our values

We not only recruit based on qualifications and experience - we recruit individuals who demonstrate the behaviours which underpin our Trusts core values. We achieve this by using values based recruitment. We are dedicated to making our recruitment practices as inclusive as possible for everyone, we are committed to promoting equality and diversity, and creating a culture that values differences.

Please note that vacancies may close prior to the advertised closing date when sufficient number of applications have been received. All new staff will be subject to a probationary period covering first 6 months in post. Travel between hospital sites may be required. Please review all documents attached to ensure you familiarize yourself with all requirements of the job