Memorandum 71
Submission from Roy Mason
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The challenge is to find the root cause of the
malady that afflicts the profession. There is an obvious communications
problem the Inquiry has got to address. Finniston spent much time
in his analysis and offered a solution the outcome of which was
the Engineering Council. The Council acceded to demands for enfranchisement
of the profession and created a toothless Engineering Assembly
only to rid itself of the encumbrance later. Changes to governance
by the institutions have moved democracy even farther away for
most engineers. The Select Committee needs to be more circumspect
from where they seek their evidence; they need to investigate
the real world out in their constituencies and those where engineers
work and live. One solution is the harmonious way the disciplines
co-operate in South Cumbria. Engineering is a multi-discipline
profession; such individuality needs to be preserved. The status
of the professional engineer has to be recognised for its pivotal
role in society. If licensing is the way forward then that initiative
has to come from Parliament there are too many vested interests
for the institutions to ask for it.
SUBMISSION FOR
THE MAIN
ENGINEERING INQUIRY
BY AN
INDIVIDUAL ENGINEER
1.1 Is the Select Committee just another
talk shop only listening to what it wants to hear? Will it be
satisfied with an analysis of the ills of the profession by the
establishment largely responsible for the malady? Or will it ferret
out a solution from the grass roots?
1.2 No doubt this missive will be summarily
dismissed as being out of time arriving after the 14 March 2008
deadline. That in it's self is indicative of the lack of communication
within the profession that the prior knowledge of such events
is restricted to so few. Certainly I, for one, had no advice that
such a significant inquiry was proposed until a report appeared
in my technical journal that the first session had already taken
place.
2.1 The Terms of Reference suggest that
a well-ploughed field is to be once again turned over. Sir Monty
Finniston did a grand job and produced an extensive report that
pulled few punches. After such an expensive exercise the government
of the day encouraged the creation of the Engineering Council,
an august body of luminaries that picked the bits it liked out
of Finniston's tome and forgot about the rest. The Engineering
Council did however set up a more democratic body called an Engineering
Assembly that was ostensibly elected by the membership of the
profession.
2.2 Some idea of the support the rank and
file of the profession were prepared to give to that initiative
may be gauged from the attendance at report back meetings in Kendal,
a small market town in Westmorland (now Cumbria). Some 150 professional
engineers, from a wide scope of disciplines, turned out for the
1986 meeting, some had made the pilgrimage from a considerable
distance to be there. The following year the number had dropped
to 25 as disillusionment set in that this Assembly was nothing
more than a carefully orchestrated talk shop. Subsequent years
saw only a handful attend. The elite Council and its executive
had taken their cue from the trade unions and submerged controversial
issues in a welter of meaningless composite motions. When the
Assembly members finally rebelled and insisted on setting their
own agenda, rather than debate a sanitized order paper, the Council
responded with a reorganisation that rid it of such irritations.
Not only was the Assembly chopped but also the Regional Organisations
were disbanded in 1997 in the name of economy. Thus effectively
silencing any dissent from the grass roots.
3.1 For the Institutions change was also
on the way. The traditional Council, democratically elected by
the membership, was to be expanded; but at the same time it would
be emasculated by the creation of a Board of Trustees with executive
power that would include determination of the agenda for the meetings
of the full Council.
3.2 The establishment has a stranglehold
on the profession; it fears the consequences of licensing engineers
yet there are some tasks that today may only be performed by suitably
licensed professional engineers. Tasks like inspection of dams,
like the supervision of maintenance and operation of high voltage
electrical systems; sea-going engineers have long been required
to have their competency certified by a government examiner.
3.3 However what really rankles with many
professional engineers, quite capable of doing the job themselves,
is the relatively recent legislation that restricts work on domestic
activities to certified artisans (ie alterations and installation
to domestic wiring and maintenance of domestic gas appliances)
particularly when some of the licensed practitioners have no theoretical
knowledge and only limited practical ability.
3.4 Even if the rights of the ordinary professional
engineer were to be asserted the full weight of the establishment,
under the guise of the Royal Academy of Engineering a body only
open by invitation and funded generously from the public sector
through consultancies, would be used to snuff out such an initiative
at birth.
4.1 If the "Select Committee"
really wants to assess the problem it needs to look way beyond
the Great and the Good and talk directly with engineers practising
at the coalface, not in management of its institutions nor those
eminent directors of large industries. If there is to be further
consolidation of the institutions then start by axing the Engineering
Council and its sister organisations who in their present incarnation
are perceived as a privatised quango that levies a stealth tax
on those who practise engineering professionally.
4.2 Despite proliferation, diversity and
insularity of the institutions nationally engineers in South Cumbria
have learnt to work in harmony for the greater good of Engineering.
A program of regular open technical lectures has attracted a significant
following amongst the general public as well as generating excellent
press coverage. The organisations responsible have been able to
reach out to schools, despite all the hurdles introduced by successive
Westminster administrations, to pass on the message why engineers
are so passionate about their job. Volunteers have achieved all
this and they manage to do it on a shoestring of a budget. This
approach could well serve as a model were it to be introduced
into other parts of the country.
5.1 The contribution the professional engineer
makes to the well being of the population is merely taken for
granted by so many. The act of switching on a light would not
be possible without the combined efforts of Electrical, Mechanical
and Civil Engineers and a host of other engineering disciplines
whether the primary source of energy be fossil, nuclear or bio-renewable.
We live in a multi-discipline society; that has to be recognised.
The public need to afford the same status to the professional
engineer as they give to the legal and medical professions, which
also accommodate wide diversity of practise. If that means licensing
so be it. Parliament will have to bite the bullet, no leader of
an engineering institution would dare ask for it if he valued
his job.
May 2008
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