Professions: Now you see them, now you don’t

The Edge Debate report into the Future of the Professions, published this week, begins in pretty strange place. The Hanseatic League of Baltic and northern Europe cities in the Middle Ages, to be precise. Why? The point is that the league, which was essentially a commercial venture set up to increase the status of the influential guilds that existed at the time, eventually collapsed under the weight of its own internal infighting and protectionism. The author of the professions report, former chief construction adviser Paul Morrell, says the institutions have just a decade to address the challenges posed to them by a changing construction industry, or face a similar fate.

So is this medieval story of decline really a parable for the situation the UK’s built environment professions will find themselves in if they don’t take urgent action? And, if it is, then what are the chances the likes of the RIBA, the RICS and the CIOB can lay aside their specific sectional interests in order to work together to fight back?

A question of status

The report finds the traditional status of these bodies and their members is being quickly undermined by the advent of larger and larger multidisciplinary consultancies, a general loss of trust in institutions, and changing priorities for the younger generation of workers. Only by working together, the report finds, can these substantial issues be addressed. The report says: “The threats and pressures for change that the professions face, if not yet existential, are real and profound, and demand change.”

For many of the young professionals giving evidence to inform this report, it is clear the professions as currently instituted have a problem of relevance. Lee Franck at Arup, speaking of having recently attained chartered status, said: “I can confirm that I can now be trusted to design a safe structure, but saying that I have gained the required skills which will allow me to tackle some of the most pressing challenges of today and the future, is a completely different question.”

Increasingly, young professionals feel their status is primarily denoted by the firm that employs them, which is more and more likely to be multidisciplinary. Ciaran Malik, of Ramboll UK, said he and his peers felt overwhelmingly that attaining professional status was being challenged by new specialisms. “Young professionals are finding that they are falling between institutions and join smaller organisations to fit their niche role,” he said, “[They] don’t feel connected to their own institutions let alone other institutions.”

Alongside this grass-roots ambivalence, the prevalence of design and build contracting has led contracting firms to take on thousands of architects, planners, engineers and surveyors - both chartered and not - which, when matched with contractors’ huge economic importance, has given them growing policy influence, often at the expense of the professional institutions. As the government’s chief construction adviser until November 2012, there are few better placed than report author Morrell to attest to this loss of professional influence. Certainly the 30-strong Construction Leadership Council, formed in 2013 by the man that replaced Morrell in the job, Peter Hansford, includes representatives from 15 private clients, contractors and manufacturers, but just two people representing the professions.

A growing number of professions

There is a paradox: professional status in general is booming. Chartered engineers, surveyors and architects remain the first people clients turn to for most construction jobs, UK expertise is highly valued around the world, and many of the institutions that serve these professions have grown healthily through recent global expansion. New professions are constantly forming in a bid to mimic their traditional status, and in the built environment sector alone the number of professions represented by the Construction Industry Council - the umbrella group for construction professions - has risen from just five when it was founded in 1988, to 31 today. The number of people in the UK defining their occupation as “professional” doubled between the 2001 and 2011 census, to more than 4.5 million.

Hence, although he agrees reform is needed, CIC chief executive Graham Watts says the bodies could choose to sit on their hands and still be around in 50 years. He told the Edge that: “The institutions in the main are successful and they are growing - internationally and commercially. They exist because generations of people have wanted to join them and I don’t see that changing.”

So are the professions really in such bad shape? For the glass half empty group, such as Morrell, this proliferation of new entrants risks undermining what it actually means to be a professional. Traditionally, of course, part of professionals’ status has come from the fact membership is a somewhat exclusive club to which entry is jealously guarded. From this perspective, the overseas growth of many institutions is just an example of institutions looking elsewhere to make up for losing relevance at home.

The only defence to this slow diminution, Morrell says, is for professional institutions to be absolutely clear about what they offer, why it is distinctive, and how that guarantee is underwritten. Former RIBA and CIC president Jack Pringle says: “Paul [Morrell] is right to highlight this issue now, it’s in the air. It’s taken 20 years to become urgent. Whether we’ve got 10 or 15 or 20 years to turn this around before becoming irrelevant is moot really. The government has already largely cut us out of decision-making.”

David Bucknall, former boss of Rider Levett Bucknall and chair of the RICS’ QS board, agrees with the urgency. “My worry is the professions have got even less than 10 years to sort this out. If we don’t take this seriously we could see a tectonic shift in the relatively short term.”

Not everyone thinks this loss of status is a big problem. Former ODA chairman Sir John Armitt says the professions should not necessarily expect to dominate the direction of the industry. “The future of the industry will be decided by the decisions and the actions of major clients and corporations responding to the market,” he says.

The problem is it is increasingly difficult to set professions apart from other people offering similar services

Paul Morrell, report author

But the reason why many do see it as important is because of the long-term impact on the fees professionals can charge. Institutions have traditionally underwritten a level of knowledge, competence and conduct from their members - precisely in order that members can charge more for their services accordingly. “Unless we pick this baton up we will just see a race to the bottom on fees,” Bucknall argues. Morrell said in Building last week that both the right to be heard and the right to demand a certain fee level could all be lost if professional status is eroded. With many practices and individuals already having suffered steep cuts in fee levels during the prolonged recession, further reductions are unthinkable for many businesses.

What can the professions offer?

To address this the report recommends professions need to quickly define exactly what it is they offer, in a way that is easily understood by clients, and can be justified and evidenced where required. For Morrell the starting point for this is a common code of ethics across all, backed by robust and transparent enforcement. In addition, current educational requirements for members need to be expanded to include multi-disciplinary and collaborative working, and be backed by a solid body of knowledge all trained professionals can point to. Finally, the institutions need to again collaborate to come up with definitive answers to the big challenges of the day: climate change, the gap between designed and built performance of buildings, and reform of the industry. “The problem is it is increasingly difficult to set professions apart from other people offering similar services,” says Morrell. “The more you dig in to what makes professionals different, the less you find to be there.”

The prime example of this is that while all institutions profess to work in the public interest, they all have very different definitions of what that means, and what they should do about it. Some, for example, attempt to put it at the heart of their members’ day to day practice, while others offer no guarantee that individuals will do this, merely that the institution as a whole should offer policy advice in the public interest. The report found no evidence than an individual member had ever been sanctioned for failing to act in the public interest, and Morrell says: “What this means is hugely variable, there’s a massive degree of confusion. Ultimately it comes down to what do you do when a client asks you to do something that’s not in the public interest. The best answer we had was ‘you do the best you can’.”

Both the CIC and individual institutes back the need to improve this situation with a common ethical policy. Pringle describes it as “a complete no-brainer,” while Hywel Davies, technical director at the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE), says: “No one will argue against this.” The RIBA’s executive director of membership and professions, Richard Brindley, says: “There is a lack of consistency across institutions and it needs to be addressed.” He says the bodies are already some of the way there, with the RIBA and the RICS working with international institutions on a common position across geographical borders.

Pulling together

But despite the unanimity, and the work that is already going on, what is the likelihood that it will actually happen? As the international work by RIBA and the RICS does not include any other UK institutions, the report concludes the CIC umbrella group is best placed to co-ordinate the necessary collaboration in the UK. But currently the CIC, as constituted, doesn’t have the power or resources to do the work, as chief executive Watts readily admits. “We’re very much a servant of the institutions, we need to be empowered by our members to take this on. The members have to agree to it,” he says. CIBSE’s Davies agrees it will be hard: “The challenge will be to get as many bodies as necessary for this involved, bearing in mind it’ll need to be taken on by volunteers in their free time around busy day jobs. It really needs someone waking up in the morning thinking about how we get to this common position.”

To achieve this, the report calls for a “rebooted” CIC to be given more power to be the vehicle for vital institutional collaboration. “We stand ready to do this stuff but it means the institutions have to empower us,” the CIC’s Watts says. However, getting 31 members to agree a unanimous position will not be easy.

And if this is a challenge even where Morrell’s report finds broad consensus, it will be much harder where critics say he hasn’t got the prescription right. Brindley at RIBA, for example, is strongly critical both of the failure of the report to address the problems of diversity in the industry head on, and its UK focus. “We see the gender gap and the ethnicity gap as a big challenge, and we see that British professionals are seen overseas as the gold standard. The report doesn’t recognise enough this global perspective,” he says. Pringle, meanwhile, said there should have been more focus on how institutions can act at a practice level, to tackle the growth in big multidisciplinary firms.

So given the multiplicity of views, getting any of the report’s findings implemented looks like a big challenge. While Watts is optimistic, Pringle admits “it’s not going to easy.” Bucknall is even more sceptical. “There’s a leadership issue here,” he says. “In principle and aspiration everyone can get behind this. But in practice will it be implemented? No. It’s fine to talk about it but we’ve got to start walking it too.”

So while institutions’ balance sheets may be healthier than ever from gaining members overseas, it seems likely this superficially impressive edifice is built on uncertain foundations. Morrell himself is only “moderately” optimistic the industry can make the required changes. “The problem with the industry is that it commonly only acts when it sees a crisis, and this is a crisis that isn’t obvious,” he says. “The overwhelming need is for leadership, I’ve struggled to find leadership in this industry.”