An Engine for Change - A Chronicle of the Engineering Council

1996-1998: THE RUDGE YEARS 117kept abreast of the EngC’s latest policies and procedures, and thereby were able to sharethese directly with the Institutions and their appropriate committee members.To enhance the NAC’s expertise, some EngC staff and members of the NAC, during 1998and in subsequent years, were externally trained on audit activities to accepted nationalstandards. At the same time, best practice was enhanced by working with the UnitedKingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS).Twenty-five Institutions were certified by the NAC in 1996 as Nominated Bodies and givenlicences to process individual applicants along specific routes to registration on identifiedsections of the Register, and to accredit academic courses. Approval was by no meansautomatic as evidenced by the fact that around one in three applications for licensing wasrejected. Bilateral agreements were set in place to enable those not fully licensed to pursueregistration activities in collaboration with a licensed Institution. A Transition RegistrationReferral Committee was set up in 1996 to deal with queries from Nominated Bodies thatwere not fully licensed; but after one rather abortive meeting this was replaced by aRegistration Standards Committee in the following year – see below.In 1996 the Institute of Hospital Engineers, wishing to attract professionals such as architectswho were not engineers into its membership, changed its name to the Institute of HealthcareEngineering and Estate Management. The Institution of Fire Engineers was grantedconditional Nominated Body status in July 1996 and joined the Nominated Bodies in 1997.By the end of 1997 there were 34 bodies that had retained or gained Nominated Body statussince Unification but three Nominated Bodies had lost or given up this status. A large newInstitution of Incorporated Engineers in Electronic, Electrical and Mechanical Engineeringwas formed on 1 April 1998 by amalgamation of the Institution of Electronics and ElectricalIncorporated Engineers and the Institution of Mechanical Incorporated Engineers, with theInstitute of Engineers and Technicians joining after this merger. Also in 1998, the Institutionof Mining Engineers merged in August with the Institution of Mining and Metallurgy,retaining the latter’s title.Two Nominated bodies failed full certification in 1998 and one new body that applied wasnot nominated. The arrangements for Learned Society Associates that had been proposed in1994 to replace Professional Associates, which we described in Chapter 5, had been falteringsince 1995. However, in 1998 the concept was given a different focus and revitalised as theProfessional Affiliates scheme, thanks to the enthusiastic efforts of Terry Smith, now Head ofthe EngC’s Membership Department. On 28 October the Institute of Metal Finishing and theSociety of Environmental Engineers both became Professional Affiliates. To providepublicity and elaboration of the benefits of affiliation to the EngC, a new pamphlet‘Professional Affiliate: Guide to the Scheme’ was published in December 1998 and soonproved its worth, as we shall see in the next chapter of this Chronicle.Interfacing with RegistrantsThe Register and CommunicationsTo maintain the efficiency of the Register and the EngC Examinations, the EngC’s internalsystems were reviewed during 1996. To explain to Registrants how their subscriptions werebeing used to promote and regulate the profession, the EngC published a ‘Report toRegistrants’ in 1997. In addition two issues of the new regular Engineering First, to mark the© Engineering Council UK 2004