Examination of Witnesses (Questions 140
- 159)
WEDNESDAY 7 MAY 2008
KEITH READ,
PHILIP GREENISH,
ANDREW RAMSAY
AND SIR
ANTHONY CLEAVER
Q140 Dr Gibson: It is like GPs or
something, is it?
Mr Ramsay: It is very similar
to the GMC standard, in fact, in many ways, in terms of the education
and the training and the competence and so on.
Q141 Dr Gibson: Are there any professions
that do not have "chartered" in front of their names?
Mr Ramsay: There are quite a few
professions. There is probably an orderly queue outside the Privy
Council office at any one time of new and developing—
Q142 Dr Gibson: So it is the Privy
Council that eventually makes the decision?
Mr Ramsay: It is the Privy Council
that decides whether to grant a charter. The Privy Council over
the years has granted 18 charters to engineering organisations.
Q143 Dr Gibson: Do they not give
them to universities as well, the Privy Council?
Mr Ramsay: They certainly do,
yes.
Q144 Chairman: Sir Anthony, you are
another organisation, the Engineering and Technology Board, and
perhaps you will just say why that came into existence. Presumably
because Andrew's failed! We will not say that, but perhaps something
happened to it. In ten, 20 or 50 years' time will we still need
the Royal Academy, the Engineering Council and the Engineering
Technology Board and will all these organisations have come together?
What is your vision when you are sat in your bath-chair somewhere?
Sir Anthony Cleaver: I hope that
is some years off, as you say.
Q145 Chairman: I did say 20 or 50
years' time!
Sir Anthony Cleaver: I think it
is, first, important to distinguish the roles of these organisations.
I think the Royal Academy, for example, like the Royal Society,
is aiming at the top of the profession, at academic excellence,
et cetera, and I think it is very important that we have an organisation
like that. That is very different from the membership organisations,
the institutions. We, in turn, represent the whole area and, therefore,
we have the challenge of trying to bring together and co-ordinate,
where we can, a single voice for engineering. I think, inevitably,
there will be the specialist interests of the various major institutions.
Civil engineers do have areas that they specifically focus on
and, quite properly, they need to make that case. I think it is
important to put it in context too in terms of the number of engineers.
There are, as Andrew said, I think 180,000 chartered engineers,
but there are also a couple of other levels of engineering which
are formally recognised by ECUK, so it is around 250,000 registered
engineers, but there are 500,000 members of the institutions and,
in fact, there are around two million engineers, in the broad
definition, in the UK economy, and our role is actually to represent
that whole body of engineering.
Q146 Chairman: But why do we need
the Board and the Council?
Sir Anthony Cleaver: As far as
the Board and the Council is concerned, that is a very straightforward
relationship. The money that comes from the membership subscriptions
comes through us to the Council and they have a very clear responsibility,
the registration, the validation, the professional standards,
and I think that works perfectly satisfactorily.
Q147 Dr Gibson: If I said to you,
you are just a bureaucratised bunch of old boys enjoying a little
bit of time in London in buildings that are half empty most of
the time, would that be too much even for Jeremy Paxman to criticise?
Mr Ramsay: I would say it was
jolly unfair. A split between ETB and the Engineering Council
took place because the Engineering Council, from its initiation,
had two roles: one to promote engineering and the other to regulate
the profession, and those two roles are not especially compatible.
Regulating the profession involves probably bureaucratic procedure,
certainly attention to detail and a need to establish processes
and quality assurance, and so on.
Q148 Dr Gibson: But you do not need
this with medicine, do you?
Mr Ramsay: I think you have it
with medicine.
Q149 Dr Gibson: We do not have all
these 36 institutions?
Mr Ramsay: You have 15 Royal Colleges,
13 bodies, I think most of them chartered, recognised by the Health
Professions Council, you have got the Academy of Medicine, the
BMA (British Medical Association) and the General Medical Council
and there are also a plethora of bodies set up by the Department
of Health.
Q150 Dr Gibson: Do all the bureaucrats
do anything?
Mr Ramsay: I would say that there
are problems in the area of medicine.
Dr Gibson: Yes, I think there are.
Q151 Chairman: Let us come back to
engineering. I am getting very depressed. We have looked at this
plethora of organisations. You all say there are too many. It
is a complicated landscape. Philip, this is your opportunity to
say: in 15, 20 years' time what is the ideal solution? What should
this committee be recommending as to how we can move forward on
this?
Mr Greenish: I think most people
in the engineering world are agreed that we would like to see
simplification.
Q152 Chairman: That is not good enough.
What are we going to do about it?
Mr Greenish: I think we would
like to see opportunities created for institutions to merge where
there are common interests that encourage them to merge. I think
it is very difficult to tell them to merge unless there is some
other from of legislation that comes up and forces the issue,
which seems very unlikely to me.
Q153 Chairman: Would you like to
see legislation?
Mr Greenish: No, I do not think
I would. My personal view is that there is merit in having people
who form together to promote and support their own part of the
profession. It would be a neater and tidier model, as Keith suggested
at the outset, if we were not where we were and if we did have
a single engineering institution, perhaps with bodies within it,
which represented those particular interest groups. I have enormous
difficulty, though, seeing how we could get to that situation
in a short period, in decades, let alone years.
Q154 Chairman: This is the century
of innovation, is it not? This is going to be the century where
innovation is what is going to drive our economy, it is going
to drive the public service, and here you are not bringing forward
an innovative idea to actually bring all this together. Keith,
you are.
Mr Read: Can I toss in a bit of
infill, Chairman. The first thing is that there are these 36 institutions.
There are lots of things they can do together which they are not
doing together at the moment but are actually gradually getting
their act together and are beginning to do. There are lots of
things they can do on the scale process. There is an awful lot
of "competition", which really should not be there because
it is non-productive and it is, if you like, nugatory work. You
can take a whole raft of bureaucratic areas where we should be
doing things together instead of doing them individually. That
will enable us to focus on what I think you are after, which is
engineers putting more into the innovation process, which is absolutely
critical to the long-term future. That is all beginning to happen,
we are beginning to work together in a way we have not worked
before, we are doing things with the Royal Academy—this
is the institutions—in a way that they had not before. The
ETB is now populated with people from the institutions and that
is beginning to become much more productive than it has been in
the past, and so on, and so we are moving towards that. What Nirvana
is in this case, I do not really know, but I share your view,
which is that engineers have got to be right in there pushing
the innovation bit. We have to push ourselves but we have also
got to be dragged into it by the people, if you like by government,
to actually contribute to those areas, and I think that is vitally
important.
Q155 Dr Iddon: Where do government
go for advice on a major issue?
Mr Greenish: Of the bodies that
are represented here, the Royal Academy of Engineering is the
only body which receives public funding as a national academy,
and that brings with it responsibilities, and one of those responsibilities
is to provide advice to government when requested. I would say
from my position that the first and most natural port of call
for advice on engineering matters generally is the Royal Academy
of Engineering. There may be instances where there is some specific
piece of detailed advice which is firmly within one discipline.
Take, for example, the recent inquiry into the floods where government
chose to go to a particular individual, an engineer, who I think
is member of the Institution of Civil Engineers, who had deep
knowledge in that particular domain, and that was perhaps a natural
choice for government. What the Academy can do as well, and is
increasingly doing when we are asked for advice or when we decide
that there is advice needed, even if it is not directly asked
for, is to bring together the skills that are available in the
engineering institutions to provide a common view into government.
We have done that in the last year; we plan on doing it increasingly.
I have to say, we have to work at it, because sometimes government
does not necessarily want to hear from the engineering profession
as a group, but it is something we want to do and are increasingly
doing.
Sir Anthony Cleaver: I think this
whole question of how we get to this Nirvana, if you like, is
one that is going to take time. We are moving quite fast in terms
of increasing the partnerships, as my colleagues here, for example,
are all represented on the ETB now. That is a change over the
last year and I think that is a significant step forward. We are
now working together in a number of areas that we were not previously.
We have a group of the communications directors, for example,
who meet together now in order to discuss the way we present it,
because a big part of the problem is simply getting engineering
more recognised in all the various groups who are important with
government, with careers advisers, with school children, with
the universities, et cetera, and there is a lot more that we can
do together and are beginning to do in that context. I think that
over time we can develop these partnerships much more strongly.
I think there will be some mergers over time and I think you will
get a more coherent view, but there are other aspects that are
very important too. We need to make sure we get the facts right.
So one of the important things ETB has been doing is producing
each year its publication Engineering UK, the last one
obviously being 2007, and that, I think, is accepted as the best
source of data on it. It is very important we get the data right,
because a lot of this is driven by the media, by popular perception,
or lack of perception. Again, we had a very interesting study
last year with the Royal Academy of Engineering on perceptions
of engineering. The results were not very encouraging in one sense,
but at least we now have a baseline, we know what those perceptions
are, we can measure that and we are now going to work together
in order to drive that up, but I think we are so far in this country
from understanding reality in many of these areas. Engineering
is critical to manufacturing, and the common perception seems
to be that manufacturing in this country is dead, and yet we actually
made more cars last year as a country than any previous year in
our history. So we have got to address those sort of issues. The
ETB's role, in particular, is to promote the role of engineering
and to transform that understanding of the whole area.
Q156 Chairman: If I were a careers
teacher in my former life and someone said to me, "Will you
tell me about engineering and the engineering professions?",
and I were faced with this landscape, it would be incredibly difficult,
unless you were highly specialised, to be able to give advice.
That is just a comment.
Sir Anthony Cleaver: Can I respond
to that one, because I think it is important? One of the things
that came out of the joint Royal Academy/ETB perception study
last year was an understanding that for the youngsters who we
are really focusing on here, the people we want to go into engineering,
their preferred method of communication is through the Internet.
We have a website called scenta which we organise and co-ordinate
on behalf of engineering. We get 10,000 hits a day. On that website
we have, for example, 750 role models of engineers, young engineers,
and what they are doing and why they are doing it. So, I think,
for the teachers, for example, we need to improve their understanding
of what is available and, again, we are working on that with the
academy in particular. We focus on the careers guidance, the academy
is working on the enrichment schemes, and so on, so I think a
lot is changing at the moment.
Chairman: Thank you for that.
Q157 Dr Turner: There is something
of a problem with the status of engineers in the public's eye.
The public do not necessarily differentiate from the guy in mucky
overalls who fixes your car and someone who engineered a marvel
like the Bridge at Mayo, and this needs to be challenged, does
it not? You are not going to get the best for the engineering
profession unless the status in the eyes of the public, which
is reflected in government and in every other respect down to
the salary cheques of engineers, improves. What are you doing
to challenge the perceived lack of status of engineers and are
your efforts getting anywhere?
Mr Read: Shall I toss in a couple
of things? The first thing is getting the publicity right, and
we have not been doing that, but we are working very hard on that
and the institutions—the Academy, the ETB and the ECUK—are
now all involved with what was the Science Media Centre but now
is the Science and Engineering Media Centre, and I think that
is hugely important because that is beginning to get us into the
media sites, if you like, and we all know how powerful that can
be, particularly in raising the status or doing the opposite.
We were actually all working together on the project. It was National
Science Week, as you are probably aware, but that is now National
Science and Engineering Week. That is because all of these organisations
are now working together to do that, again, to raise the profile.
We are developing the National Science Fair, an annual fair, a
very large event particularly focused on young people. Again,
we are all engaged on that. That, again, itself should raise the
status. So, in terms of the outward looking, we are developing
these things. There is a long way to go and we have a lot more
to do. There is a one other thing that might help—I do not
know if Andrew would like to comment on that—and that is
statutory recognition of professional title. If you are looking
for one thing that this committee could do, it might well be to
promote that. Andrew.
Mr Ramsay: Yes, while I would
not be an advocate that government should get involved in regulating
the profession, I think recognition of the profession would be
a great help. In most of the other countries we work with there
is legal recognition of title—not necessarily function,
because it is very difficult to recognise function because the
function of engineers varies right across the economy, but the
title engineer, or at least chartered engineer and probably the
other titles, engineering technician and incorporated engineer,
would indicate that government took engineering seriously. There
is an Architects Registration Board, there is a General Medical
Council which you have to register with in order to practise in
the Health Service, to be a lawyer in the court of the UK you
have to be a member of the Law Society or the Bar Council. Engineers
can call themselves engineers and there is no constraint on what
sort of engineer you employ to build your fighter plane or your
bridge or your motorway.
Q158 Dr Turner: I was going to come
to the question of the statutory recognition of title. You have
this, to a limited extent, with the title of chartered engineer
already, but you want to build on it. Do you want to end up with
something like the German model, Herr Doctor Engineer, who is
a pillar of society that everybody recognises? What sort of title
would you like to see and how would you regulate it?
Mr Ramsay: The profession is not
terribly together, you will not be surprised to hear, on prefix
titles. We did introduce something called Euro Engineer, which
you are allowed to use on British passports only if you are registered
with the European Association, which we are a major player in,
as a professional engineer. EURENG—not a terribly attractive
title! I think there is a case for having a prefix title: Engineer
Ramsay or Engineer Greenish, or IR, as some countries use. We
had a visit from the President of the Hong Kong Institute of Engineers
last night at a reception and he and all his delegation had prefix
titles IR, indicating that they were registered in Hong Kong as
engineers. I think that would make some way towards improving
the status of professional engineers.
Q159 Dr Turner: Presumably, to back
it up, there would have to be rigorous entry qualifications to
this status, which the Engineering Council would be happy to recommend?
Mr Ramsay: We do actually apply
very rigorous requirements, and for that reason, partly for that
reason anyway, we only are recognising something like a third
of the people practising as professional engineers in this country.
The others either have not bothered or consider it might be too
difficult to gain chartered recognition, but, of course, for many
of them there is no economic problem about not being a chartered
engineer because employers do not at the moment discriminate terribly
much between chartered and non chartered.
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