ICE response to MHCLG on built environment professions strategy

As a professional engineering institution with over 95,000 members worldwide, the ICE's purpose is to improve lives through infrastructure.

Through professional qualification, accreditation, continuing professional development, professional conduct arrangements, and knowledge-sharing activities, the ICE plays a central role in promoting competence, ethical behaviour and public trust within the civil engineering profession.

Summary of our response:

• The built environment does not suffer from a lack of standards, frameworks, qualifications or regulation.

  The UK already has a mature competence system, including professional qualifications, UK-SPEC, professional registration, CPD requirements, codes of conduct and regulatory oversight.

  The more important challenge is ensuring that these arrangements translate into demonstrable capability, sound judgement and effective decision-making in practice.
• Competence, behaviour and accountability should not be treated as separate policy issues. Competent outcomes depend not only on technical knowledge, but also on professional judgement, ethical behaviour, willingness to challenge, personal responsibility and effective accountability.

• Independent assessment provides stronger assurance than qualifications, training records or employer sign-off alone because it tests whether individuals can apply knowledge, manage risk, exercise judgement, communicate effectively and act ethically in real-world situations.

  Competence should be treated as a lifelong obligation, maintained through continuing professional development, audit and professional conduct arrangements rather than as a one-off achievement at the point of qualification.

• Client capability is one of the most significant and often overlooked determinants of project outcomes. Competent designers, contractors and operators cannot fully compensate for clients that do not define requirements, appoint appropriately, understand advice and exercise informed oversight.

• Expectations around competence, behaviour and accountability should be driven by the consequences of failure rather than whether an activity falls within the definition of a building.

  The strategy must reflect the needs of infrastructure as well as buildings, recognising that failures in assets such as bridges, tunnels, dams, reservoirs, temporary works and flood defences can have equally serious consequences.

• Procurement remains one of the most powerful levers for improving outcomes. Approaches focused primarily on lowest cost can undermine competence, quality and long-term value.

  Better procurement can be used to drive higher standards, stronger accountability and greater investment in capability across the supply chain.

• Learning from failure is a major opportunity for improvement. A mature competence system depends not only on standards and enforcement, but also on the ability of the profession to identify, share and act on lessons from failures, near misses and safety concerns.

  CROSS-UK and the findings of the ICE Building Safeguards Review are examples of how a stronger learning culture can improve safety, professional judgement and public confidence.