An Engine for Change - A Chronicle of the Engineering Council

1999-2001: THE HAWLEY YEARS 177November 2001The Engineering and Technology Board LaunchedThe ETB officially came into being on 14 November 2001 as a company limited byguarantee and a registered charity. The membership was:Dr Robert Hawley (Chairman)Sir Peter WilliamsSir Joseph DwyerKeith ReadMartin TempleMichael SandersonMandy MayerAndrew RamsayProfessor Patrick DowlingMichael KippIain SturrockAlastair MacdonaldSt Catherine’s College, OxfordInstitution of Civil EngineersInstitution of Marine EngineersEEFEMTADTIEngineering CouncilUniversity of SurreyBAE SystemsNortelBritish Computer SocietyThis was identical to the Shadow Board except in two respects. Andrew Ramsay, the actingDirector General of the EngC replaced the departed Malcolm Shirley while Sir PeterWilliams joined as Chairman-elect. It was planned that he would succeed Dr Hawley on 1January 2002.Sir Peter’s appointment augured well for the ETB. He came with a distinguished industrialand academic career, a fitting combination for the Chairman of the ETB. He had beenmanaging director at Oxford Instruments for 17 years and was Master of St Catherine’sCollege Oxford, Chairman of the Science Museum and President of the Institute of Physics.Fortunately for the 2-day a week ETB post, he was due to relinquish all of these shortly. Heplanned to retain however his Board membership at GKN and was about to take over asPresident of the British Association for the Advancement of Science which could be seen asdovetailing quite nicely with the aims of the ETB.Additionally Sir Peter knew of the background having been a member of the EngC Senatefrom 1996 to 1998. He acknowledged, in an interview reported in the IMechE journalProfessional Engineer, that “The Engineering Council was a step forward … the ETB takesus forward again … the ETB job is a huge honour and something I absolutely want to do…the real appeal is the ETB’s task of bringing engineering out into the wider community ... thejob is to broaden the horizons of engineering, to include people who hadn’t consideredthemselves part of it… maybe 2 million of them, according to the Malpas Report of last yearthat looked into how many people use engineering methods or ideas in their daily work”.On the other side of the coin, Sir Peter was quick to reassure existing professional engineersand their Institutions that he would be working with them, not against them. The interview inthe Professional Engineer concluded with his words “the ETB will be the body to focus allthe effort and reinforce it. My task will be to persuade ETB Board Members that they notonly have a responsibility to Registrants and constituents but also a wider responsibility to theETB and what it stands for. If we end up voting on constituency lines, we will have failed.But we won’t do that”.© Engineering Council UK 2004