An Engine for Change - A Chronicle of the Engineering Council

232A CHRONICLE OF THE ENGINEERING COUNCIL(large) engineering Institutions and the Engineering Council. It is not clear that the reformedEngineering Council is any more effective than the old - rather to the contrary.Professor John CaldwellWith hindsight I have one over-riding view which affects almost everything within theenvironment called the Engineering Council and whilst Sir William Barlow said this many,many years ago, I find it worryingly still true and very much responsible for manyfrustrations which have inhibited the direction and influence of the Engineering Council.When I look at the four senior Presidents who finalised the negotiations with Sir JohnFairclough for the shape of the new Engineering Council it is clear that subsequently whenthey were no longer Presidents of their Institutions the messages and actions from “their”Institutions were very different than at the time of negotiation and agreement.It seems to me that the President of an Institution these days does not necessarily speak at allfor the deep held views of his Institution and many of his speeches are personal and arecertainly not supported by a large majority of his membership and this has been particularlytrue in the last 2 or 3 years within the Institution of Civil Engineers.We therefore have a very odd situation where agreements to proceed within the general“environment of engineering” are made by specific individuals who held their post asPresident for one year and then are by no means followed up and supported by their particularInstitutions shaping the detail where, as Sir John Fairclough said, “the devil lies”.Furthermore, the top-down Government responsibility via the DTI is also similarly dependentupon particularly transient Ministers and Civil Servants and therefore when an agreement ismade between everybody concerned, it is strange that the people who made it do notnecessarily have to carry it out in the spirit in which it was conceived.Brian KentSenatorI was well aware of the background of the Council and the process that had been taking place(The Fairclough Initiative) begun by Sir John Fairclough. I was unaware of the deepremaining disagreements between engineering institutions concerning Unification and thefuture role of the Council. I was also unaware of their suspicions that a hidden agendaremained to amalgamate them. Sir John Fairclough later acknowledged to me his concernthat, had I known, I might have hesitated before accepting the job.It also transpired that completion of arrangements on the way ahead was not nearly as farforward as I had been led to believe. As examples, the new Royal Charter was still far fromagreed and we were extremely hard pressed to complete the work in time for the launch ofUnification and the New Council at the beginning of 1996. Also, no thought had been givento organising an event to mark the launch and it proved very difficult to book a major Londonvenue in the time available. None of the major Institutions was prepared to help, judging thenotice to be too short and the funding inadequate. I could not help noticing an element ofunholy glee at our predicament!It was clear that they saw nothing to celebrate in Unification, one of them still refusing toaccept the word even after the thousands of hours of discussion to arrive at the famous© Engineering Council UK 2004