I said in yesterday’s blog post that I was waiting to hear how the consultation meeting (on Charter documentation) at the Institute of Actuaries in London went yesterday. I have kept quiet for several weeks about this in the hope that the leadership would respond to points previously made, but the consultation period ends tomorrow, so if I am to comment at all, now is the time.
Although I hear that yesterday’s meeting was well conducted, what I heard about it (including that it wasn’t very well attended [only about 20 members], that those joint Council members present didn’t offer a lot of detail as to what problem the proposed new Charter was meant to solve) has I’m afraid confirmed my impression that, so far, the process has not been handled very well. Why do I say this?
1. Given that the CAP merger vote was defeated in July, putting the new Charter proposed for that merger forward once again for consultation seems to be putting the cart before the horse.
2. The justification given for the current consultation exercise seems to be given in Paragraph 13 of the Consultation Document, which states “For some years the Councils have thought that the governing documents of the two bodies were cumbersome and not easily understood. They had been frustrated at times by the differences in
structure between the two bodies and had found that change was not always easy.” However, no evidence was provided to back up these assertions and despite David Wilkie posting on 30 October 2009 (on the official forum [member login required]) the question “The first question that should be considered, and Councils need to answer, is what exactly is wrong, if anything, with the present Charters, Byelaws and Rules” there has been no official response some three weeks later. Why not?
3. I understand that at the Institute meeting yesterday, those Council members present, when the same question was put to them, could only give a single practical example, which was that the two current Charters (of the Institute and Faculty) were inconsistent in that Honorary Fellows of the Faculty were entitled to vote, but Honorary Fellows of the Institute were not. It would be a simple matter to bring the situation into line.
4. As mentioned in my blog post of yesterday (and previously here and on the official forum), no response has yet been provided to the detailed criticisms David Wilkie made of the proposed CAP Charter in June. It does not seem right for Councils to invite detailed comments on the same Charter document in October and November 2009 when they have ignored comments about it made in June. Are those of us who had concerns about the proposed charter supposed to repeat similar comments in the current consultation, and if so, how is this supposed to give us confidence that comments previously ignored will be taken into account this time? How is asking us to make comments again supposed to give the members and the public confidence that we are an efficient professional organisation?
5. We claim to be an evidence based profession, and I agree that that is what we should be. Where is the evidence from minutes of either Council that the existing Charters are cumbersome? On the contrary, both have been successfully revised several times over recent decades, and in particular, the Faculty’s governance is particularly easy to alter because the Charter is very brief and most of the substance is in the Rules & Byelaws, which do not require Privy Council approval to change.
6. In contrast to what Councils have done, I will point out here examples of some actual problems with the current Charters (credit to David Wilkie for pointing out this to me and other members during the debate about the merger), however none of these is significant to warrant a change to a brand new document:
- for the Institute, at present there is no time limit specified within which Council must arrange for a Special General Meeting to be held once it has been requisitioned by members. This was a major reason why opponents of the CAP merger requisitioned a Faculty SGM, but not an Institute one, in June of this year (because there was no guarantee that Institute Council would hold such an SGM in time to influence the merger vote on 23 July).
- for the Faculty, nominations for new Council members include, in addition to member nominated candidates, a “slate” of candidates proposed by the Council, which smacks of Soviet style governance rather than a more democratic system where candidates are nominated purely by members. However, perhaps Faculty members are currently content with this system (does Faculty Council know whether they are or not?), and this is for Faculty members to decide, and not me as an Institute member – I merely point this out as Councils are asking for comments on governance.
- also for the Faculty, there has recently been some debate as to the exact meaning of Rule 20, as to whether Councils’ duty to “call” an SGM within 28 days of receiving a valid requisition means that Council must arrange for an SGM to be held within 28 days of receipt of the requisition or not (with Council arguing that “calling” a meeting does not mean that the meeting must actually be held within 28 days): the wording of this Rule could easily be clarified.
7. I am not surprised that yesterday’s meeting was poorly attended: many members are weary of the whole continued merger process and hardly likely to engage actively if (as the evidence shows continues to be the case) criticisms on the forums are met with silence rather than rational opposing argument. I am again posting this outside the official forum (although with a link to this article from that forum), here on my blog, and on the Actuarial Outpost, because so few members read the official forum (the most popular post has received 259 views during the 10 weeks since its posting on 11 Sep 2009, or an average of only 4 page views per day, from a forum which has over 18,000 members).
In conclusion, I hope that the outcome of the current consultation is better than the way that the process has been handled so far.
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