An Engine for Change - A Chronicle of the Engineering Council

84A CHRONICLE OF THE ENGINEERING COUNCILThe unification initiative was not cheap; its costs were shared 50:50 between the EngC andthe Institutions, the largest element, by far, being the election process, although it was agreedthat the expense of future elections would be born by the EngC. Because of these costsexpenditure on new initiatives and particularly on regional projects had to be held inabeyance during 1995.The Privy Council approved the EngC Petition for a Royal Supplemental Charter and Byelawson 7 December 1995 and the Supplemental Royal Charter was issued on 24 January1996.Senate and the Two BoardsThe new internal structure is shown in Fig.7. However, it was recognised that not all of therequirements of the Supplemental Royal Charter could be implemented immediately.For the longer term the Supplemental Royal Charter required the 54-member Senate tocomprise:(a)(b)(c)Twenty-four members who were voting Registrants and elected by votingRegistrants.Twenty-four members who were voting Registrants and who were, or had been,either present or past members of the councils of the Nominated Bodies and whowere elected by the governing bodies of Nominated Bodies.Up to six members who were appointed by the Privy Council, one of whom wasa Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.Pivotally, item (b) gave the Institutions, for the first time, a direct voice in the ruling body ofthe EngC. In an ideal world this may not have disadvantaged the Profession, since the electedmembers were to still sit as individuals rather than as representatives. But in practice the newsystem gave the Institutions the power to control the activities of the EngC when it came tointerpreting the EngC having “a centralised role only for those activities best performed at thecentre”.Senate was to endeavour to ensure that its chairman and other members together reflected aregional distribution. Members, who became termed “Senators”, were to provide a reasonablebalance among those with experience and knowledge of the major areas of industry,significant engineering disciplines and their respective learned societies, those concernedwith the education and training of potential Registrants and individuals from all three sectionsof the Register. Voting to determine the membership of Senate in categories (a) and (b) wasto be on the basis of a ‘College’ structure of 4 colleges comprising clusters or groups ofInstitutions as listed in Annex F [very similar in composition to the, albeit five, ExecutiveGroup Committees]. The Registrants within each College were to elect 6 members of the newSenate according to a complex formula depending upon the sizes of College membership.This College structure, originally proposed in the Unification Steering Group’s report‘Engineering into the Millennium’, had now been effectively watered down to the pointwhere its only function was to facilitate the election procedure to Council. Previously, it willbe recalled, ‘Engineering into the Millennium’ had envisaged the Colleges being “theprincipal source of advice to the Council”. Such formal collaboration was not to the taste ofsome Institutions that wished to retain complete independence of action while being able,© Engineering Council UK 2004