The President of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors has written to Dame Janet Pareskeva, OBE, the Head of the Institution’s Standards and Regulation Board and in effect required her resignation. This creates a new situation in the regulation of professions in Britain. As the Editor has kindly invited me to comment from outside the surveyors’ profession, this new loss of regulation for surveyors seems an important topic.
Writing as a doctor, regulation in the health professions is very different. Most regulatory organisations for the health professions follow those that developed in the medical profession in 1858. These arrangements differ substantially from those in the surveying profession. In the health-care world there are usually three separate national organisations each dealing with three important functions: national regulation in the public interest, professional standard setting, and a union function for pay and conditions. In medicine the General Medical Council (GMC) is the regulator, the Medical Royal Colleges are the standard setters, and the British Medical Association (BMA) is a registered trade union.
There are core principles underlying this tripartite arrangement and a substantial literature including the Merrison Report (1975) and a book, the title of which, tellingly, includes the words “public trust” (Irvine, 2003) and many articles by Sir Donald Irvine (Irvine, 2001), an international expert on professional regulation. Professions are important and in Britain have considerable powers but professionals are human and without regulation a minority of professionals take advantage of the public and a small minority disgrace their profession. Conflicts of interest are inevitable and occur in all professions. Bernard Shaw (1906) wrote of professions being “a conspiracy against the laity.”
Professional associations will always be needed for the interests of each profession but the public interest needs an institutional voice too. In medicine the medical Royal Colleges are the oldest organisations. For dentistry there are three separate national organisations, matching medicine. Nursing differs as the Royal College of Nursing combines academic and union functions but we are learning that losing that separation can mean that the union function becomes dominant. There is, a separate, independent regulator for nurses and midwives, the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC). For architects, who often work with surveyors, Parliament in 1997 established the Architects Regulation Board, separate from the RIBA.
Traditionally, professions like surveyors and politicians regulated themselves, but self-regulation can have many problems, as in Parliament, where numerous examples of conflicts of interest and self-interested behaviour have occurred. The trend over time is towards independent regulators separate from professional associations.
The RICS website states that:
“The Standards and Regulation Board has exclusive responsibility for exercising RICS’ regulatory functions, including strategy, governance, structure, policy and operational oversight in the public interest. It oversees the activities of RICS’ professional standards, entry and admission to the profession, education and qualification standards, regulatory operations, dispute resolution services and the Regulatory Tribunal.”
The recent letter from the President of the RICS made it clear to Dame Janet and the Standards and Regulation Board, the members of which have now resigned in Dame Janet’s support, that their Board was not in a position to conduct the regulatory function independently. The professional, representative, function has been shown to be dominant and in control. The regulatory function has been lost and at present surveyors as a profession are unregulated.
The public interest has been lost which matters as the decisions that surveyors and valuers make underpin the construction and mortgage industries with huge financial implications affecting the British economy. It is unlikely that any Government, of any colour, can leave such an important profession unregulated.
There are now two main possibilities. The RICS may try to re-establish a new Standards and Regulation Board similar to the old one, still sitting within the RICS. However, after seeing the remarkable exchange of letters that led to the resignations of the old Board, distinguished and appropriately experienced citizens may not now be queuing up to do such a job. Nor is it clear that having the regulatory function inside and subordinate to the professional function within a single professional body is any longer appropriate in the 21st century.
The other main possibility is that society, through Parliament or Government, now establishes an independent regulator in the public interest. It is unlikely that Government will stand idly by with so many big financial decisions involved with such far-reaching consequences across society.
Government involvement would probably lead to the establishment of a new, fully independent, regulatory body for the surveying and valuing professions. Its membership is likely to be influenced by the established independent regulators for other important professions, especially the General Medical and General Dental Councils. This implies a membership with a high proportion, at least half, of lay people, the right to give professional guidance, and legally enforceable powers in the public interest to remove the right to practise from erring practitioners. The GMC also regulates British medical schools.
The likelihood of government intervention has been greatly increased by the 2023 Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill, which includes an unusual provision, unique for British professions, allowing Government to intervene directly in the RICS, which is specifically named. As this Bill was published before the recent exchange of RICS letters, the implication is that the RICS was already in the Government’s sights.
The word “crisis” is much overused but the current absence of regulation for surveyors justifies its use.
