UK General Election 2024

The engineering community and the IMechE stand ready to assist the new government to ensure policies are implemented using sound technical advice. The IMechE’s Head of Policy, Matt Rooney, lays out the Institution’s plans to make sure our voice is heard.

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak shocked many in the political world last week when he called a General Election for Thursday 4 July. With the Conservative Party behind in the polls, most analysts assumed that Mr Sunak would wait and schedule the election for the autumn in the hope of a swing towards his party.

The IMechE policy team is now working to ensure that the voice of our members, and the wider engineering community, is heard, both during the election campaign and after. We have contributed to a soon-to-be-published report by the National Engineering Policy Centre (NEPC), ‘Engineering a resilient and prosperous future: Policy priorities for the next UK parliament’ summarises many of the issues that we would like to see prioritised, with a focus on issues like sustainable infrastructure, net zero, and technical skills.

The IMechE’s policy team will be publishing a series of blogs and social media posts in the run up to the election. Then, once a new cabinet is formed, we will publish our own independent IMechE recommendations to the government.

We will help shape the public and engineering debate, with a specific focus on our key policy priorities:

• Climate change and sustainability
• The future of transport and mobility
• Healthcare and infectious disease control
• Education and skills

We aim to increase visibility of our Institution, present the Institutions policy positions in a clear and concise manner, and produce short documents to inform members who can act as force multipliers for our messaging.

You can follow us on Twitter/X, LinkedIn, and our website to follow the Institution’s policy outputs.

Image credit: https://creativecommons.org/