It has been produced by the joint Engineering Ethics Reference Group (EERG), established by the Engineering Council and the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) in 2019, chaired by Professor David Bogle CEng FIChemE FREng, Deputy President of the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE).
A launch event takes place at 6pm on 21 February – see link to register below. The event, which is free to attend, will include a panel discussion with Professor Bogle, Chi Onwurah MP, Engineering Council Chairman Professor Chris Atkin CEng FRAeS FREng, Dr Ollie Folayan CEng FIChemE, co-founder of AFBE-UK, and others.
In other news, Dame Judith Hackitt has stressed the need for competency, accountability and responsibility to be at the heart of the new building safety system, in order to rebuild the public’s trust in providing safe homes for people to live in. She was speaking at the IET National Conference for Electrotechnical and Building Safety Competence on 31 January.
Dame Judith’s presentation explained how legislation will incentivise the take up of professional registration, which in turn will help to demonstrate competency. She stressed how the focus must be on delivering quality buildings that are safe, with genuine engagement with residents needed to rebuild trust: “competence and quality assurance must become part of the new culture across the whole of construction.”
As the UK regulatory body for the engineering profession, the Engineering Council plays a crucial role through setting the internationally-recognised standards for professional registration. As Engineering Council CEO Alasdair Coates explained in his presentation to the IET National Conference, the Engineering Council also holds the register of individual engineers and technicians who have been assessed as meeting that standard of engineering competence and commitment. SOE, as a professional engineering institution, is licenced by the Engineering Council.
Alasdair Coates said: “The Engineering Council’s vision is to maintain society’s confidence and trust in the engineering profession. Professional registration is important because standards matter – particularly in safety-critical areas of work, the public has a right to expect engineers to be able to demonstrate their competence and behave in an ethical, sustainable way.”
Implementing one of the recommendations of Working Group 1 – Engineers (following Dame Judith Hackitt’s report), the Engineering Council is developing a contextualised standard for engineers working on high-risk buildings. This is a version of The UK Standard for Engineering Competence and Commitment (UK-SPEC) 4.0, which will embed BSI’s overarching competence framework standard for everyone working on a building, specifying the engineering competences.
The electrician EngTech Standard developed by IET is an existing example of a contextualized standard. It sets out the competence requirements specific to electricians, providing a clear route and makes it straightforward to understand how their experience meets the requirements. This both acts as a national benchmark of competence for electricians, whose expertise is safety-critical, and demonstrates how the Engineering Council’s generic standards can be contextualised for specific roles or sectors.
Sir Julian Young, IET President, said: “Professional registration is an important milestone for any engineer or technician, as it demonstrates professionalism, competence and personal commitment to the engineering and technology sectors.”