An Engine for Change - A Chronicle of the Engineering Council

114A CHRONICLE OF THE ENGINEERING COUNCILforward”. And for a while this may have been the case, but further upheaval was around thecorner, as we shall see.At the third Annual Conference of the EngC, held in April 1998 at the Institute of MarineEngineers’ offices, The Duke of Kent presented Professor Sweeting of the University ofSurrey with the Chairman’s medal for his work on satellites. Margaret Beckett, President ofthe Board of Trade, spoke on the important contribution engineers make in improving thecompetitiveness of the UK and its economy. She also confirmed the Government’s supportfor Quinco, the campaign to promote engineering [see below]. Shadow Chancellor FrancisMaude spoke on a single European Currency.Stemming from the Fairclough Initiative, the Partnership Document ‘A Lasting NewRelationship – A Proposal for a UK Engineering Confederation’ that the 39 EngineeringInstitutions had agreed with the EngC, and to which the Presidents of all these Institutionshad added their signatures towards the end of 1995, was intended to last for three years from1 January 1996 with a further review planned at the end of this period. Hence, to look furtherahead from 1999, the Board for the Engineering Profession (BEP), with the approval ofSenate in July 1997, set up a Strategy Working Group (SWG) to consider ways forward. Theaim of the SWG was “To create, in Partnership with the engineering Institutions, a Strategyto Guide the Engineering Council’s role and operations up to the year 2005 in the context of ashared vision for engineering in the longer-term future”. The scope of the SWG, agreed bySenators, was “To act on behalf of the Senate of the Engineering Council. It was to consultwidely within the engineering community in the UK, taking views from: the engineeringInstitutions, industry, the Registrants, relevant Trades Unions, the Government, Academe andother interested bodies”. The SWG began meeting in August with Senator Tony Ridley asChairman [he was also the BEP Chairman]. Its membership of 15 included two InstitutionSecretaries, Senators from the BEP and the BER, and four EngC staff members. Apreliminary draft Strategy was presented to Senate at its meeting in May 1998. It is not clearhow far this move took into account the MOU with Government.However, at its September 1998 meeting, Senate approved the conducting of anothersignificant review of the EngC’s various and diverse activities. It was believed that after threereasonably successful years, further improvements in the relationships with the Institutionswere desirable and some tuning of the EngC’s activities was now apt. Some Senators felt thatthe EngC was spreading itself too thinly and, instead of concentrating on its core objectives,was possibly expending resources on peripheral activities. Consequently, the StrategyWorking Group that was looking ahead to 2005, was put on temporary hold [it resumed itswork in January 1999] and rather confusingly, a separate Activity Review Group was set up,chaired by Dr Alan Rudge, also Chairman of Senate. This Activity Review Group comprisedRoger Dobson, Director General and Secretary of the Institution of Civil Engineers, RobertFoster, Senator and DTI Staff Member, Malcolm Shirley the EngC’s Director General, PeterWason, Secretary of the IIE and Dr John Williams, Secretary of the IEE. Therecommendations of the Activity Review Group were embodied in the Activity Reviewreport, entitled ‘The Way Forward’ which was presented to Senate at Dr Rudge’s finalmeeting in February 1999, as we shall see in Chapter 7.The SWG had concluded in early 1998 that a new strategy was needed for marketing theRegister nationally. Its recommendations were incorporated into the Activity Review Group’sdocument ‘Engineering 2005’, a draft of which was sent to Institution Presidents andSecretaries, Senators and others for comment. Its 11 recommendations – particularly a more© Engineering Council UK 2004