Economic Advisor: Economic Modelling Lead
| Posting date: | 08 October 2025 |
|---|---|
| Salary: | £57,515 per year |
| Hours: | Full time |
| Closing date: | 22 October 2025 |
| Location: | Leeds |
| Company: | Government Recruitment Service |
| Job type: | Permanent |
| Job reference: | 431525/2 |
Summary
Are you excited about scoping and delivering cutting edge economic analysis of the transformational impacts of transport investment, using economy modelling tools such as computable general equilibrium and land-use transport interaction models?
If so, we’d love to hear from you!
DfT is a high-profile department at the heart of UK government. We work with agencies and partners to support the transport network that helps businesses and gets people and goods travelling around the country. We plan and invest to make journeys better.
Joining our department comes with many benefits, including:
- Employer pension contribution of 28.97% of your salary. Read more about Civil Service Pensions here
- 25 days annual leave, increasing by 1 day each year of service (up to a maximum of 30 days annual leave), plus 8 bank holidays a privilege day for the King’s birthday
- Flexible working options where we encourage a great work-life balance.
Read more in the Benefits section below!
Find out more about what it's like working at DFT.
The Department for Transport is seeking an Economic Advisor to lead the development of economic modelling capability within the Cross Modal Modelling (CMM) team, part of the Transport Appraisal and Strategic Modelling (TASM) division. This role sits at the centre of DfT’s analytical work. You’ll help build integrated, multi-modal modelling approaches that support better decision-making, policy development, and investment. This is an exciting opportunity to influence the future of transport modelling and contribute to a high-impact, collaborative team.
Your responsibilities will include, but aren’t limited to:
Exploring ways to best capturing synergies and interdependencies between investments when undertaking economic modelling, to support effective place<1>based business cases. This should enable us to better assess transformational impacts.Develop new analytical tools for assessing the economic impacts of major projects and programmes of transport investment, across modes, at a strategic level. These would interface with our existing National Transport Model (NTM), and make use of evidence contained within our Transport Analysis Guidance (TAG). They should be consistent with the Department’s WITA software. This would cover standard economic benefits analysis, alongside WEIs. We do not currently have a tool to carry out robust, strategic appraisal of national policies, so this would be a step-change in TASMs capability.Explore and take forward options for modelling transformational impacts using SEM techniques based on the outputs of our strategic transport models. In the initial phase this will involve identifying a range of potential options, and where possible building on recent work to develop SEM approaches within DfT (e.g. building a CGE model with DBT or the TfN LUTI project). The ultimate goal of this work is to allow a more sophisticated in-house economic appraisal of projects and portfolios, at a strategic level, which accounts for interactions between transport and other sectors of the economy (such as land use change). This would ideally be a hybrid of CGE and QSM models, taking advantage of the latest developments in academia.Deploy these tools to assess proposed programmes of investment, allowing capturing synergies and interdependencies between investments, which is not always done when projects are assessed on a scheme-by-scheme basis. This could help inform the development and appraisal of transport strategies and policy. This will then put is in a stronger position to inform spending review decisions and project prioritisation.Produce a reproducible analytical pipeline or other suitable platform, for these economic analyses, with supporting documentation.For further information on the role, please read the role profile. Please note that the role profile is for information purposes only - whilst all elements are relevant to the role, they may not all be assessed during the recruitment process. This job advert will detail exactly what will be assessed during the recruitment process.
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