Institution news
Dear Member,
It has been a week of progress that started with 1,000 engineers in London meeting to discuss nuclear engineering. It was a meeting organised jointly by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Chinese Nuclear Society and ourselves.
One of the main challenges up for discussion was the reduction in construction cost necessary to keep nuclear electricity generation competitive with other technologies. The UK Government has set a target of 30% reduction by 2030 for its own programmes. One reason for the current cost that our members might like to check is a claim that of all of the nuclear plants already existing in the world no two are identical. Every one is apparently bespoke. Even if that’s not true, it reminded us of our core purpose that we still have work to do to “improve the world through engineering”.
In the meantime, we have been busy getting the papers out to our Council and Trustee Board for their meetings coming up next week. As you know, they will be discussing the objectives and perhaps more importantly the processes to be followed by our finance and our governance reviews. Key issues are the inclusivity of the groups assigned to work on them and then the mechanisms to review and then of course implement their recommendations.
Initial comments on the finance review relate as much, if not more, to our head office costs, as to the ability of our subsidiaries to provide income. However, we need to balance any changes in costs with the strong desire to maintain investment in our Learned Society and hence improve the way that we deliver our core charitable purpose. One guiding principle is that we will do all we can to avoid paying consultants to advise us when it is clear that we have great expertise already in our membership to design and implement a solution.
On governance, there seems to be a strong desire to take a close look at our By-Laws. The last few months have shown that they are often silent or maybe ambiguous on some of the issues that have arisen. Fortunately, there appear to be few disputes amongst the membership, more a desire for improved clarity. An example is the Chair of Council. It has been custom and practice that it is the President but that is not stated in the By-Laws. Neither are the By-laws clear about what we do when we haven’t got a President! It makes starting the Council meeting on Wednesday rather interesting. We will of course take the opportunity when we make the By-law changes to include other improvements to ensure that we have a structure and a representation that once again has the confidence of our active membership.
Overall, we are looking forward to a very important week in our Institution’s history. At the end of it, we hope to be able to not only introduce our new Interim President, but also to share some details of the two reviews that mean our great Institution can focus again on building towards 2019 and beyond.
Colin Brown
Interim Chief Executive