An Engine for Change - A Chronicle of the Engineering Council

ANNEX I 2314. Any comment on the Fairclough Initiative?The recent changes appear to give a better balance. We must involve the Institutions but notlet them gain free access to the running of the Council. If we go too far in this direction, wewill follow the sorry path of the PEIs. Senate is necessary but it is rather ponderous.Meetings should perhaps be extended into the afternoon to allow more open debate on issuesof the time. Consider inviting Chief Executives and Presidents of major Institutions (oneInstitution at a time) to Senate and invite them to present their approach to running, andmaking more effective, the Partnership.Les MercerSenatorSo far as the Unification project is concerned my personal aims were achieved in that Iwished to help create the framework where the whole engineering profession could speakwith one voice and act together. I believe we achieved an appropriate framework although theextent to which it has been used to drive the profession forward to become more visible, morevigorous and more unified is perhaps debatable and somewhat of a disappointment to me.The main difficulty in this work was of course the suspicion and vested interests of theInstitutions, in particular the “big 4”. The crucial turning point came with the winning over ofthe IEE President Alan Rudge to the cause and his success in hammering out the compromisethat the other big Institutions would accept. In my opinion most if not all the fears expressedat the time by the Institutions concerning loss of their power, status, identity or controlalthough understandable were unfounded. I suspect that most of the ill feeling that existed atthat time was more to do with way in which the Engineering Council had originally comeinto being and the personalities of the individuals involved than it was based on any rationalthinking.Kenneth BurrageI hope it will be possible to describe the processes which led to reform of the EngineeringCouncil in 1996. The model developed achieved wide consensus support, and incorporatedideas from the Construction Industry Council as well as balancing political desires to ‘unify’the profession with the understandable independence held dear by long-establishedengineering Institutions. Unfortunately, the crucial new development - the Board for theEngineering Profession, which should have been a force for integration and sharing of idealsand opportunities within the profession - was not properly understood by its first members, orindeed by the newly-appointed Director-General and the Director for the EngineeringProfession. It needs much greater buy-in from Institutions in order to succeed in capturingjointly-agreed projects and identifying common public relations issued.Andrew RamsayThe present size of the Engineering Council Senate seems to be very unwieldy and perhapsaccounts in part for the lack of demonstrable progress, or of notable initiatives, since the 1995reformation of the Engineering Council. Thus, in the current leaflet outlining the work of thecouncil, only one of the nine “Key Initiatives” listed therein was not already firmly in placesome years before 1995. And that one initiative - the “Regional Network” - can scarcely becalled successful. The work of the Board for the Engineering Profession seems to have beenespecially unproductive of new ideas; - perhaps reflecting the on-going tension between the© Engineering Council UK 2004