The average member of the RICS – the institution that regulates standards, values, and protocols across the profession – must be holding their heads in their hands right now. Has the leadership just shot itself in the foot again, or is it going to prove a lot more serious than last time? I fear it is.
The announcement by President Ann Gray last week that the whole of the Standards and Regulation Board (SRB) has apparently resigned en-masse in support of their Chair – who might have a case for constructive dismissal – is extraordinary. It lays bare for us all how fractured things currently are at RICS headquarters.
Ms. Gray, an American architect by training, should be commended for having taken the mantle of President at such a tricky time, following the Levitt and Bichard reviews. To her credit, she upped-sticks from her Californian base and plans to stay in the UK until her term is up; the Presidential flat in Great George Street would probably have helped that decision, but it is still highly commendable in my view.
Many will have now seen the President’s letter summoning Dame Janet Paraskeva to a meeting with the intention to remove her as Chair of the SRB. Said letter is far from commendable, and unacceptable on at least three counts:
The first is simply what it says and how it says it, which is unbecoming of a national leader in the modern world. I would expect many Human Resources professionals to be squirming at its contents. Perhaps things are done differently in America, but we are not American; I would have expected UK protocols to be followed. I am amazed that it got through the RICS HR review at all. If, of course, it did…
Secondly, it finds the accused guilty without any apparent trial, then goes on to pass judgement with a draconian sentence. Even if Ms. Gray firmly believed that the accused would have been found guilty, it shows remarkably poor judgement in my book. We may never know the outcome, as a trial will not happen… Except, it still might!
If it does, it will make for essential, if not macabre, viewing. It might be quite a spectacle having the overseas-based President go up against an English Dame with a formidable reputation and who is no stranger to Regulation and the Law; neither are shrinking violets, and it is important to note that Dame Janet has vehemently denied the accusations made in her resignation letter.
Thirdly – worst of all in my book – the letter appears to illustrate that the culture that Levitt laid bare less than two years ago remains intact; the culture that led to the rightful resignation of the top five jobs at RICS at the time. Surely the institution should have learned from such recent and grave mistakes. There really does appears to be a pattern of removing people without due process and the revelation of such a poor, retained, and apparently ongoing culture will likely prove a disaster, though for different reasons, as the CBI will affirm.
It is important that we all get to know whether the full Governing Council – whom Ms. Gray is also Chair of – authorized issuance of that letter. If they did, Gray has at least some defence until December. However, frankly, we would need a new Governing Council, and I believe the President should stand down now for the crisis that her actions are likely to cause.
The reason that this is so serious – and quite different from the sackings of four non-executive directors who were perceived to have gotten in the way last time – is that we are talking about the sacking of a Regulator here; quite a different matter. I would have expected senior management to have understood the consequences of writing such a letter to Dame Janet, and that it was highly probable for the remainder of the SRB to stand down as a result. If not, then someone was asleep at the wheel, adding to the series of poor judgements leading up to this case.
The best that the RICS can probably hope for now is that Ms. Gray has indeed overstepped her brief. If she did not have the full support of Governing Council, said Council can argue that their reputation is still somewhat intact. One might have thought that such a scenario was unlikely, but given everything we have seen so far, it feels within the realms of possibility.
Whatever your view, it is mine that the letter was not the action of the person that Lord Bichard has called upon to be the “pinnacle” of our profession, and that will ultimately be her downfall. Lord Bichard’s 2022 report is clearly generating huge questions internally and the hasty acceptance of all its recommendations by a Governing Council on the back foot should now be reviewed; “too many cooks” as one editor has recently expressed. To be fair, the tensions and pressures from within that have given rise to last week’s events must have been extraordinary, but the RICS has somehow ended up with coal and not diamonds.
If another vacancy arises at short notice, the obvious candidate to step into the breach as Chair of Governing Council is Martin Samworth, the respected ex-leader of CBRE and Chair of the RICS “Executive” Board. He should be credited with stopping the CEO search process first time round. By all accounts, a much stronger candidate apparently starts this week and we should offer Mr. Young our best wishes; it is not an easy gig right now.
Mr. Samworth is a respected man, seen as someone who can get things done, and appears untainted by these events. So, assuming that this does not change, he potentially makes an excellent Chair of Council for the time being. It does not make sense to me that Bichard proposed a Chair of RICS Board and a President who chairs Governing Council, so it would be a very elegant solution to promote one of those to the other role, killing two birds with one stone. That might then allow the President Elect to come in early in a glad-handing role, which is really what it is.
Even before all this, the institution had to readvertise the Senior Vice President Role recently. I am amazed that the appointment committee have announced their chosen candidate literally within days of their new closing date, raising further questions of process in RICS. Without wishing to undermine the candidate selected, how can an appointment be made so soon after the new closing date, unless he was perhaps the only applicant? On the face of it, there does not appear to have been enough time to do a thorough, multiple interview process, and if the candidate had appeared the first time, then why readvertise?
I have heard it said that the appointment of President in a professional body should be by the membership rather than a small committee, which is apparently the process that we have here. I am inclined to agree with that.
All of this, and whatever else is going on under the tip of the RICS iceberg, suggests that RICS is far from a happy ship. Sadly, it is likely going to get worse before it gets better and all this could not have come at a worse time; the Levelling Up Bill has just been through Committee stage in Parliament, and Clause 213 survived the Lords debate intact. That Clause, to remind readers, gives the Government the right to step-in to review the RICS and its workings.
In a previous article I argued that the clause “over-reached” and was not in the interests of Chartered Surveyors worldwide, nor the general public. However, the last week or so’s actions must create the real possibility that we are going to see that clause come into play all too soon. Those in senior leadership at RICS who had convinced themselves that it was benign might repent of that assumption at their leisure.
I personally do not think that a profession as important as the RICS will fail to draw Government attention now; the Government is already interested, and with Clause 213 almost safely in their back pocket, I judge they will feel that they have no alternative but to act on these announcements. They are the de-facto regulator in-waiting now. It is ironic that the President of the RICS itself is the one that might have handed the institution in on a plate. That is the consequence of poor decisions further back down the line of course; other professions have regulators, and they are typically external. Many of those I must remind you dear reader, are government.
You might have thought that the RICS leadership would have understood a key principle of regulation; that it is in the public interest not the profession’s interest. It was something of an anomaly for the RICS to regulate itself. It therefore had to be done well for it to be allowed to continue; an internal independent regulator should provide a higher quality of regulation than an external one, in my view. I have no doubt that Dame Janet understood that very well. I suspect that she took the responsibility very seriously. Part of her accountability in the role of Chair of the SRB would have been to argue for greater resource, and such requests should not have fallen on deaf ears. If resource was to be removed from the SRB, then I am not surprised there was a disagreement.
By way of some balance, there might well be more to come out about the collapse in relations between the SRB and the executive. However, it is very likely that the leadership will be constrained from saying anything more in public at this time. Given that it was always likely to be the case, it was even more important that this shake-up, if that is what it is, was undertaken with more finesse.
You may not want to agree, but I believe external regulation by Government in some form must be the odds-on bet for the RICS now. It will be interesting to think through the many consequences, one of which I can see is a lot of members who do not actually need to be members inadvertently losing their renewal documentation. One thing however is almost guaranteed; things will never again be the same in the RICS. The President’s removal of the SRB Chair will, in my view, result in constitutional change. Given that the RICS has apparently not learned the lessons of the past few years, that might be no bad thing in the long run.
In the short term however, we could be treated to Dame Janet making a reappearance of considerable force if she feels that her national reputation has been tarnished. I would not want to bet that she will go quietly. Even in the hurly-burly of the City of London financial world I would not expect to be treated so poorly if my time was up, regardless of faux-pas; there are far more elegant ways of dealing with change these days. That said, Dame Janet might be more magnanimous. She might also have in mind that she might make an excellent Government appointment in due course as the first external regulator of the RICS. We will see, but there is probably some late-night worrying at RICS about what she might do next.
Who would have thought that the inner workings of a professional membership organization could be so exciting? History in the making no less. There are a few twists and turns to come as RICS scrambles to answer the questions posed here, so things are not likely to settle down quickly. All of this is to be played out under the public gaze. If I had written it as a script, you would not have believed me.
