Senior officers: Nicole Wood | Essex County Council

Nicole Wood

Finance and Technology

Salary: £169,104

Nicole joined Essex County Council in 2008 after working at Hackney, the Audit Commission and Oldham. She is currently the Executive Director for Finance and Technology.

Responsible for:

procurement services
finance (including income and payments)
Essex Pension Fund
technology services
SELEP accountable body

Within and prior to Essex County Council, she has held many varied roles outside of corporate services, including leading various major infrastructure programmes (schools building programme, office consolidation and rebuild programme) as Assistant Director of Children’s Services and a commissioner for education services.

Within Essex, Nicole has held various Finance leadership positions supporting front line services, including Children and Families and Place services before moving to corporate finance roles. Through her role within corporate services, Nicole has lead numerous organisation redesigns of support services and managed services ranging from Business Intelligence, Insurance, Risk and Commercial. Nicole became the statutory Chief Financial Officer (S151) in 2019 having been Deputy for a number of years. She also holds the position of S151 of the South East Local Economic Partnership (SELEP) and the Essex Pension Fund.

Within corporate support services, Nicole has a passion for professional excellence and reputation of support – promoting new talent through apprenticeships, interns and graduates. Most recently she has been focusing on development of business partner skills and working with CIPFA (the public sector accounting body) on developing an approach for Finance, which will be extended to other support in the function. She also represents on various regional and national working groups in her capacity as an Essex finance leader, and is an enthusiastic Local Government Association peer reviewer, seeking out learning from other authorities.