Latest News - September 2007

ETB dispands the Registrants' Panel

The Engineering and Technology Board agreed changes to its Articles of Association at the AGM on 11th July 2007 to increase representation on the Board by some of the larger engineering organisations.

Six new trustee positions have been created. The Institution of Mechanical Engineers, the Institution of Civil Engineers and the Institution of Engineering and Technology can each now nominate a council representative to the ETB Board. The other 32 engineering institutions will be able to elect a further two board members and there will also be a seat for the Royal Academy of Engineering. The size of the ETB Board remains the same at seventeen members.

Four trustees from the Registrant's Panel and two independent trustee positions have been removed to make way for the above changes. These have apparently been introduced in response to pressure from the larger institutions who have been threatening to withhold payment of the registration fees of their members unless ETB improved its performance.

The Registrants' Panel (also known as College A, one of three electoral colleges), comprising 24 individual members who were appointed through independently run elections, has been disbanded. The future of the panel was under review in the latter part of 2006 but even as late as March 2007 there was no definite proposal to disband it. However, it is known that the G15 (a self appointed group of Chief Executives mostly representing the larger professional engineering institutions) had been lobbying for the Registrants' Panel to be dissolved.

The Registrants' Panel was set up in the first place to provide democratic representation for registrants and to provide effective means of communication between the ETB, the institutions and registrants.

Communication with registrants has undoubtedly been a major problem and the ETB's reliance on the institutions to communicate with registrants rather than doing it themselves has made things worse. As one registrant put it "I pay my registration to this body and hear nothing from it from one year's end to the next".

The abysmal response to previous Registrants' Panel elections is probably due to the fact that very few registrants were aware of the elections being held, leaving aside the question of whether or not they were interested in the first place. It is also not known how many registrants were sent the agenda of this year's AGM and whether they were clearly notified of the intention to disband the Registrants' Panel. Attendance at the AGM was reported to be about 25 - 30 people.

Syd Croft, Northern Centre Representative on UKAPE's Executive Committee, was a member of the Registrants' Panel and the first he knew of the changes was in a letter from the ETB Chairman on 13th July 2007 notifying him that he was no longer a member of College A or the ETB. The letter is reproduced below. The Executive Committee is deeply concerned not only at Syd's summary dismissal but also at the cavalier manner in which the last remaining democratic voice of the engineering profession has been eliminated without full and open consultation with registrants. We are also sympathetic to concerns expressed by some of the smaller engineering institutions that they too have been disenfranchised by the changes.

UKAPE's Engineering Profession Working Party is currently investigating the circumstances surrounding the ETB governance changes and will report further in due course. It is hoped to enlist the support of senior members of the engineering profession and leaders of the union to reach a satisfactory conclusion. Watch this space!

Syd Croft writes:

Anybody who takes the time to think about the implications will realise that there is something sadly wrong with ETB's reconstitution. Since we, the Registrants, contribute significantly to the ETB's funding and now have no directly elected people to represent us, the situation is very similar to the principle of 'no taxation without representation' that caused so much trouble on the other side of the Atlantic in the second half of the eighteenth century.

One question worth asking is who attended the AGM where the decision was taken to eradicate the Registrants'? Were they democratically elected? Frankly, their action smacks of dictatorship, and shouldn't happen in this day and age. I would be interested to learn the European Court of Human Rights views on the subject

It is important that the voice of 'ordinary' Engineers should not be lost from the Board. It would however be interesting to learn the ETB's definition of an 'ordinary' Engineer, and compare it with the backgrounds of the people who are replacing those who were on the Registrants' Panel. For example, I think it is stretching creditability a little too far to class the Chief Executive of the IMech E as an 'ordinary' Engineer.

Click here for text of ETB letter

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