An Engine for Change - A Chronicle of the Engineering Council

VERDICT 185represent the engineering profession both in the UK and internationally. It also, for example,committed the Government to look to the EngC “…to offer advice on national issues such aseducation, training, industrial competitiveness, risk, the environment…where engineering is amajor factor”.Unfortunately, nothing much came of this. Maybe because of the difficulties of developingthe ‘New Relationship’ a sufficiently strong political will was absent in the EngC Senate, orelse the importance of the MOU was insufficiently recognised.Be that as it may, the whole future of the EngC was about to be overtaken by events. A freshinitiative, which we describe fully in Chapter 7, was launched in 1999 with a steer from anew (now Labour) Government Minister to ‘add value to the wider engineering community’.There was a subtle change here from serving the profession to serving the community. Afterintensive, protracted and wide-ranging discussions the upshot, at the beginning of 2002, wasthe division of the EngC into two parts. One was the Engineering and Technology Board todevelop the community idea – taking in some existing efforts such as NeighbourhoodEngineers and Industry Affiliates. The other was, with a fresh Charter, the EngineeringCouncil (UK) which was now confined to the regulation of the profession in the UK and itsrepresentation internationally.Appraisal of 20 Years’ ActivitySo at the end of the day, can any objective judgement be passed on the success or otherwiseof the Engineering Council from the granting of its Charter in November 1981 to itsreplacement in February 2002 by the ETB and the EC(UK)?By the nature of things it is difficult to claim a one-to-one correlation between any particularactivity of the EngC and a perceived improvement on the national scene - because it canalways be argued that other, possibly more powerful, economic and cultural influences wereat work. However, to take just one example, that of the WISE campaign, national data showthat during the life of the EngC the proportion of women entering engineering degree coursesrose from about 6% to more than 14%. Not all of this may be attributable to the efforts of theEngC, but it would be perverse to argue that none of it was, bearing in mind the evidentsuccess of the campaign on the ground.Opinions of ContributorsTo attempt an all-round assessment of the EngC’s impact, questionnaires were circulated tocurrent and previous EngC Council and Senate members, Directors-General and Directors,other EngC staff and Engineering Institutions. A number of personal interviews were alsoundertaken.Two of the questions asked were:1. What had been the EngC’s ‘Successes’, ‘Partial Successes’ and ‘Shortcomings’?2. What should be its future priorities?We provide below a summary representing the consensus of opinion in each case. Althoughthe answers to the second question have largely been taken over by events, the responses mayprove to be useful to the EngC’s successors and other bodies.© Engineering Council UK 2004