Engineering: turning ideas into reality - Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee Contents


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160 - 179)

WEDNESDAY 7 MAY 2008

KEITH READ, PHILIP GREENISH, ANDREW RAMSAY AND SIR ANTHONY CLEAVER

  Q160  Chairman: Can I ask whether Sir Anthony and Philip agree with Des' point here and the one that Andrew and Keith raised? Just very briefly, do you support that?

  Mr Greenish: I do, and I add another aspect too, if I may. In terms of recognition of what engineers actually are as professionals, there is a huge education task that needs to be done, and it is an education task at every level and at every age, and the perceptions audit which Tony referred to showed that, although the level of ignorance is enormous in terms of people understanding what engineering actually is, it does not take very much to raise that level of understanding substantially and the penny drops in people's minds, young people's minds, after not very much explanation about what engineers actually do in the world. So that actually focuses most of our minds here on the importance of getting into schools, of getting careers advice.

  Q161  Chairman: Just on this title, I want to stick to the title: do you support government actually intervening here to make the title "engineer" protected in law?

  Mr Greenish: Yes.

  Mr Ramsay: I think it is worth recognising that government lawyers would probably advise that reserving the title "engineer" would be very difficult, because throughout the economy people are calling themselves engineers. It is a word that goes back to the fourteenth century at least. It would have to be a qualified title. So something like "chartered engineer", which at the moment is protected by civil law, just like any trade mark, being protected by statutory law would be a big difference; it would indicate government was serious.

  Mr Greenish: That is my view too.

  Q162  Dr Harris: Can I follow this up? Have you made any progress with government in pursuing this? The osteopaths managed it, and one can have a view about osteopathy, but any progress with government in the last 100 years on this topic?

  Mr Ramsay: We have had many discussions with government, mainly DTI, and, as far as regulation of the profession is concerned, the response has always been: "Fine yes, if industry are prepared to support it." I think regulating just the title is quite a new idea that we are discussing within the profession.

  Q163  Dr Harris: Let us go further into that. You have asked for some sort of regulation you have just described. Let us take the example of "chartered engineer" being protected, and the Government has said, yes, if industry says yes, and what have they done?

  Mr Ramsay: There is a hidden rider there, which is that, of course, governments are generally not in favour of increasing red tape for industry. Anything that constrained industry from choosing who they might employ in an engineering function would be seen as anti-competitive. So we have shifted subtly from that position of looking for regulation of function to simply regulation of title, which appears to be lightweight but at least indicates that this Government is interested.

  Q164  Dr Turner: There is a point there. Regulation of titles is relatively easy, we can deal with that with an administrative stroke, but most other professional titles, like doctors registered by the GMC and so on, have more significance than that because they cannot legally practise their profession unless they hold those titles; they would be breaking the law. Can you see any mechanism by which you can actually underpin the title of "world chartered engineer", or whatever, with some statutory requirement for them to have that title to undertake certain work?

  Mr Ramsay: No, if you look closely at the professions where regulation is an entitlement to practise, you find that you have got monopoly purchasers like the National Health Service. It is, in fact, possible to practise as a surgeon, providing you have the permission of your patient, outside of the Health Service, if anyone is silly enough to do that. There is no regulation that I am aware of that prevents that. Similarly with lawyers, the access to the courts of the UK is the principal issue here. People can call themselves lawyers and can practise in big commercial firms as lawyers without having any membership of the Law Society or the Bar Council. The problem about engineering is that it is entirely ubiquitous. Engineers are used throughout the economy at every level and for every purpose and it is absolutely impossible to draw a line round engineering and say that is it. The nearest that any country has got to this is Canada, where to practise as a professional, indeed to call yourself a professional engineer, you are required to be registered with one of the provincial licensers. Canada is experiencing big problems because its huge mineral resources are requiring an awful lot more engineers than they can train themselves, and those engineers who wish to work in Canada, or are brought to work in Canada, are finding difficulty being recognised and calling themselves engineers, and this is a real problem there.

  Q165  Dr Harris: On the more limited scope, the more limited ambition of protection of title of chartered engineer, which you explained was not one that would be seen as anti-competitive, what progress have you made with the Government agreeing to provide that, as they have for osteopaths?

  Mr Ramsay: We have not asked the Government. I am hoping this may be something this committee might see as worthwhile.

  Q166  Dr Gibson: Why have you not asked the Government yourselves? Why do you expect us to do it for you?

  Mr Ramsay: Because it takes time for the profession itself to agree on seeking something like this and it is a consensus profession.

  Q167  Dr Gibson: I thought you all agreed with each other that you should do this; so what is holding you up? You are frightened to go to the Government there.

  Mr Ramsay: I think you will find that within some of the professional institutions there would be a reluctance to go for this because it might be seen as undermining the standing of their own titles.

  Sir Anthony Cleaver: My concern, in a sense, is a slightly different one, I have to say. This is focusing at the top end of chartered engineers and so on, and that is very important and critical to us in the same way that having the right number of really good engineering graduates is critical, but we actually have a much bigger problem in this country at the moment that really demands our attention, and that is at the engineering technician level. If I can give you one or two statistics there, one in five engineering employees say they have serious skills gaps. That amounts to some 70,000 people that they are short. Only five per cent of those are at the professional level, it is the technician level, and there we have got a serious issue in terms of the numbers of people who go into FE. Over the last, I think, ten years the number of people in FE studying engineering and technology has declined by 25 per cent.

  Chairman: I am going to come on to some of those issues, so can I pass on that, Sir Anthony.

  Q168  Dr Harris: I have got one more question to try and stagger through, if you could bear with me. I am interested to hear that on the limited ambition of getting "chartered engineer" protected the Government has not formally been approached yet because of divisions or the need to get agreement?

  Mr Ramsay: Consensus; there is not a particular division.

  Q169  Dr Harris: A lack of consensus is another way of calling it a difference of opinion, at least in my family. If you were to approach the Government, do you have an easy way in or is it through the business focused DTI? Is there a portal into government that is sensitive to engineering as engineering rather than just as an industry issue? In other words, should there be a government chief engineer or chief engineering adviser?

  Mr Ramsay: We would support that.

  Mr Greenish: We would support that. If it is not an individual who is called the Chief Engineering Adviser, then it should be formally enshrined in the Chief Scientific Adviser, but we firmly believe there should be a very specific focus at that senior level on engineering in government.

  Q170  Dr Harris: Is the Chief Scientific Adviser engineering enough for you over the last few appointments, or have you felt that they have concentrated on non engineering types of science?

  Mr Greenish: I think we have felt that there has not been sufficient focus on engineering, given its importance.

  Q171  Chairman: Do you all agree with that?

  Mr Read: I would agree with that. I think Philip is speaking certainly for the institutions in that respect. Yes, I think we would all agree with that.

  Q172  Chairman: Andrew and Sir Anthony, do you agree?

  Mr Ramsay: I agree.

  Sir Anthony Cleaver: Yes, I think so. I think, again, of course a number of the Chief Scientific Advisers have actually been engineers themselves. John Fairclough is one who springs to mind in my case. I think it has varied enormously on the individual who has been appointed into that role. I think the decision really is whether you have a chief engineer as such or whether you have it enshrined within the Chief Scientist's role very specifically that that must be accounted for.

  Ian Stewart: Good morning. Can any of you identify for me where the severe engineering skill shortages are in the UK and internationally?

  Q173  Chairman: I will come back to you, Sir Anthony.

  Sir Anthony Cleaver: This is exactly the area that I was concerned with. The biggest shortage at the moment is at the engineering technician level. These are the sort of people who historically went to the Polys, they are the sort of people who go through FE, typically, who may then go on in some cases, but many do not, and the requirement there is enormous and we have a real concern about that. As I said, over the last few years in FE the number of people studying engineering and technology has declined by 25 per cent. We know that the cohort coming through in the population is smaller as we go forward over the next few years, so there is a challenge there, and there are a number of other issues. For example, the completion rate. Of the people who go into it, the completion rate is getting down towards only 50 per cent, so we have serious problems in that area. That is an area that we believe we need to tackle. We are about to launch a campaign later this year specifically aimed at that area, but, again, that is an area that needs everybody working together, as with apprenticeships, for example. We welcomed the extra money in the last budget going into this area, the push on the apprenticeship schemes and so on, but this only works if you get industry, government and academia all working together, and what we are trying to do with this campaign is to push in that area working with some of the RDAs, working with the FE establishment, working with the employers. We have a business and industry panel as part of the ETB, so the leading employers send a representative on to our business and industry panel and we use that and regularly consult them to understand what employers are looking for in this context, and that, again, is their bigger concern, which is why they are very supportive of this campaign.

  Q174  Chairman: Is that reflected internationally?

  Sir Anthony Cleaver: Yes, indeed.

  Mr Ramsay: The point I would like to make is that this is especially true as far as technology engineers, level three in the economy are concerned. There is a much better established market in professional engineers. We benchmark "chartered engineer" against equivalents around the world and there are well-established flows of engineers back and forward between different countries depending on economic demand. The problem for professional engineers is that it takes at least seven years to create one from leaving school, and they do not respond terribly well to changes in the demand of the economy. So the international market is very important, and we have been quite successful in the UK in selling our engineering expertise overseas. We have a substantial trade balance in favour of engineering services.

  Q175  Chairman: Is this in specific sectors, both the shortages and the surplus? Can you say which sectors of engineering have got surpluses which areas have got deficits?

  Mr Ramsay: You can divide down into quite narrow branches of engineering and find enormous variations in demand even from year to year. In broad terms, I can recall that round about 1990 the construction industry in the UK fell off a cliff—it was the when Canary Wharf was bankrupt, and so on—and construction had died.

  Q176  Chairman: What is it like now?

  Mr Ramsay: Right now, there is a tremendous demand for civil engineers, which is the point I was going to make. In fact the response has been a 45 per cent increase in the number of people studying civil engineering over the last four years. So there is clearly some feedback.

  Q177  Ian Stewart: How has that come about? What have you done to make that increase happen?

  Mr Ramsay: We as the engineering councils are not directly involved in promoting specific branches of engineering, and this is where the 36 institutions do have a positive role to play. The Institution of Civil Engineers has worked very hard to promote civil engineering in schools and through the joint efforts of—

  Mr Read: I was going to say, the individual institutions will respond to the market. Of course, their livelihood actually depends upon them recruiting members, and so where there is a perceived deficit, trying to get people to go through the university courses, recruiting the students, the graduates, and so on, into the institutions is part of that market mechanism. The other point I was going to make is the linkage between the sector skills councils and what Tony was talking about in relationship to the engineering technician. The competencies that the engineering technicians have need to be reflected in what the sector skills councils are looking for. I think in some respects there is a mismatch between what the Government perceives the sector skills councils should be doing and looking for and what industry actually needs. What the Engineering Council in its registration can do in actually helping bridge that gap—

  Q178  Ian Stewart: Who has the strategic role then? If you have this plethora of different bodies on the delivery side and responding to the market, who has the strategic role?

  Mr Read: There is no single strategic body, if you like.

  Q179  Ian Stewart: Is that not a weakness?

  Mr Read: I think it is, and that is what we were saying earlier. We are trying to get the organisations working much more closely together than we have done in the past.


 
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