Affinity Water have a great opportunity for a 12 month secondment as a Debt Recovery & Partner Manager

As a Debt Recovery & Partner Manager you will lead our debt recovery operations and strategic supplier partnerships, ensuring excellent customer outcomes, strong cash collection performance, and full regulatory compliance.

Reporting into Head of Cash Collection & Debt Management, you will manage customer-facing teams and third-party suppliers, including debt collection agencies and litigation partners, ensuring services are delivered efficiently, consistently, and in line with Affinity Water standards.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead debt recovery and collections activity across internal teams and external suppliers.

• Deliver customer experience targets, including C-MeX and affordability commitments.

• Drive cash collection performance while ensuring fair customer outcomes.

• Manage key supplier relationships, performance, governance, and budgets (c.£3m annual spend).

• Ensure compliance with regulatory, legal, and company policies, including vulnerability and affordability strategies.

• Lead continuous improvement initiatives and support customer transformation programmes.

• Coach and develop teams, fostering a high-performance, customer-focused culture.

• Collaborate with stakeholders across the business to achieve operational and customer objectives.

About You

Essential:

• Experience managing customer-facing teams and team leaders.

• Experience managing third-party suppliers, including debt collection agencies or outsourced providers.

• Proven ability to manage high-volume operational workloads.

• Strong stakeholder management and influencing skills.

• Experience coaching teams and driving performance improvements.

• Track record of delivering continuous improvement initiatives.

Desirable:

• Knowledge of the UK regulated water industry.

Key Skills

• Customer-focused mindset

• Leadership and people management

• Stakeholder management

• Excellent communication skills

• Decision-making and problem-solving

• Performance and compliance management

• This is an exciting opportunity for a driven leader who is passionate about delivering excellent customer outcomes while maximising operational performance and cash recovery.
  

Recruitment timeline:

• Closing date: Friday 24th July 2026

• Interview date: Thursday 30th July 2026

Benefits:

• Salary up to £45,000 dependant on skills and experience

• Learning and development opportunities, including mentoring and a range of formal courses and open learning resources.

• Entry into the company annual bonus scheme.

• Annual leave from 26-30 rising with length of service, and the option to purchase up to 5 extra days.

• A ‘Celebration Day’ in addition to public holidays that people can use to celebrate a religious festival or other occasion that is important to them.

• A generous 'double match pension scheme' that doubles the contributions you make (company contribution capped at 12%)

• We offer a range of family benefits including enhanced Maternity, Adoption, Paternity, Shared Parental Leave, Fertility Support Leave and up to 5 full or 10 half days of paid Carers Leave.

• Menopause policy and Reasonable Adjustment policy to help everyone perform at their best.

• Access to our Wellbeing Centre with support for looking after your physical and mental health.

• Discounts at a Range of Retail Outlets through our Tap4Perks scheme

• Discounts on Dental and Medical Insurance through our Tap4Perks scheme through salary sacrifice

• Up to 4 Affinity days a year to volunteer in the community.

• Life Assurance.

Disability Confident

As a Disability Confident employer, we’re committed to offering interviews to disabled candidates who meet the essential criteria and opt in on the application form. Ask the Talent Acquisition lead for the full job description to see all the criteria. If we have a very high volume of applicants and we’re not able to offer interviews to all, we’ll take a fair and proportionate number of disabled candidates through.

Affinity Water recognises the benefits of greater diversity in our workforce to better reflect the communities we serve. We are committed to building a more inclusive culture where every member of our workforce can thrive.

You can find out what it’s like to work at Affinity Water through our career site https://www.affinitywatercareers.co.uk/ where our colleagues share their career development stories and you can get a feel for our company culture.