An Engine for Change - A Chronicle of the Engineering Council

116A CHRONICLE OF THE ENGINEERING COUNCIL(iv)Assisting in improving Institutions’ members’ understanding of the EngineeringCouncil role and relationships with the Institutions.The resource implications of the recommendations were considered and it is fair to state thatsome improvement in relationships did result.Nomination and Audit Committee and Engineering Council RepresentativesAfter forty-three meetings held between 25 November 1983 and 18 January 1996, the EngC’sNominations Committee responsible for approving the Institutions’ applications to becomeNominated Bodies, was reconstituted to meet the revised requirements of the post-FaircloughEngC. It was renamed the Nomination and Audit Committee (NAC), and held its firstmeeting on 22 March 1996. At this time, in keeping with Fairclough’s idea of reducing thenumbers of EngC committees, the concept was introduced of licensing the Institutions toundertake certain registration activities that the EngC committees had hitherto performed.Among the changes ratified by the NAC was the redefining of the roles of Representatives ofthe EngC. As we described in Chapter 3, the Accreditation Representatives’ system,originally implemented by the CEI, had been largely adopted by the BER on 9 September1986 but with some redefinition of the roles of the AcReps and their relationship withNominated Bodies. Basically it was the task of each AcRep to sit with a Nominated Body’sappropriate committee to advise and ensure that SARTOR standards were being maintained.The system enjoyed only patchy success and several AcReps had left the team. All remainingAcReps had been briefed in March 1994 by Terry Smith, the EngC Quality AssuranceExecutive and their role was broadened from looking after only accreditation to coveringmembership as a whole – much in line with the original principles laid out in SARTOR’sCode of Practice. But by that September the Nominations Committee accepted that theAcRep system had become almost moribund and so in November 1994 a new post ofCompliance Executive was created to, inter alia, retrieve and manage the situation. JamesWalker was appointed and, with substantial backing from Terry Smith, began to recruit newvolunteers to the team who were now, with their wider remit, termed Engineering CouncilRepresentatives (EngCReps). On 13 June 1996 the team of EngCReps was brought togetherfor their first Seminar but soon afterwards James Walker left the EngC to join an Institution’sstaff.In October 1996, the NAC redefined the roles of the Representatives and, after a hiatus, ColinChapman, a Chartered Chemist as well as a Chartered Engineer, and former Head ofTechnical Training Policy for Nuclear Electric plc, joined the EngC’s MembershipDepartment as Compliance Executive in September 1997. In this role he managed the team ofthe 50 or so experienced volunteer Registrants acting as EngCReps. All the volunteers werenominated to the team by “their own” Institution and one or more were then allocated byColin Chapman on behalf of the NAC to another Institution to attend specified meetings of itsmembership and education/accreditation committees. The EngCReps thus became an integralpart of the EngC’s audit of the Nominated Bodies, to confirm compliance with the conditionsof their licence, with SARTOR and other requirements, whilst facilitating the sharing of bestpractices among the Engineering Institutions. From the early part of 1998 Colin Chapman,who had been an EngCRep himself allocated simultaneously to two Nominated Bodies,improved the effectiveness of this scheme by initiating and organising half-yearly trainingseminars every Spring and Autumn. This ensured that the volunteer Representatives were© Engineering Council UK 2004