Helping policy play its part

In 2020 Mark Beard, Chairman of construction group Beard, will become the 117th President of the CIOB. His Presidency will follow from Charles Egbu, Dean of School of the Built Environment and Architecture at London Southbank University, who will become CIOB President in 2019, and Chris Soffe, CEO of Gleeds America, who became CIOB President in July. In our guest blog, he discusses his new role as Chair of the CIOB Policy Board.

Earlier this year I had the honour of being appointed as a Vice President of the CIOB and have now taken up the post, chairing my first policy board meeting earlier this month.

There is a tradition of succession at the CIOB in which future Presidents are appointed as Chair of the CIOB Policy Board. It’s a very effective way of helping prospective Presidents get up to speed on the latest policy developments in the industry and the policy positions that the CIOB is implementing or developing.

The Policy Board is one of the CIOB’s three key operational boards and has arguably a higher profile than other strands of the Institute’s work as this is where policy is formulated and public and parliamentary engagement is planned. The aim is to make the CIOB’s policy positions as robust as possible and support the CIOB executive team engage and influence policymakers. The main tasks for the Board are:

• To help identify our policy and public affairs priorities

• To support work building and developing key relationships with stakeholders, mainly other industry bodies and parliamentarians

• To contribute to consultation responses and help develop content for policy-related events

It’s my belief that the Policy Board is a core part of the CIOB’s work in shaping and influencing the external environment. Board members help the CIOB ensure that the built environment is one of the issues that policymakers understand and are able to make the case for, with a focus on promoting best practice in the construction industry for the benefit of society.

I am delighted to have the opportunity to be a part of this work at a time of great challenge and change for our industry. I look forward to building on the outstanding work of CIOB past presidents; in particular, turning the excellent research carried out by the CIOB Quality Commission into meaningful actions which improve the quality of the buildings we construct.

I am greatly looking forward to working with Eddie Tuttle, our newly promoted Policy Director, and the wider CIOB policy team to reinforce CIOB’s position as the built environment institution that brings forward thinking and pragmatic solutions to the challenges our industry faces.

To find out more about what we’re working on, or to get involved, check out the CIOB policy website at https://policy.ciob.org