ENERGY AND CARBON-SAVING
‘The voice of engineering’to be heard in policy debates
Presenting in the day’s first session as part of a webinar staged by IHEEM on 14 April in conjunction with HEFMA and the Carbon & Energy Fund (CEF), at which the three organisations launched their A Healthcare Engineering Roadmap for Delivering Net Zero Carbon document (see also pages 27-30), Dr Nick Starkey, Director of Policy at the Royal Academy of Engineering ( the ‘Academy’), discussed some of the ways that the engineering community, across its many disciplines, is looking to play its part in the UK’s drive to meet demanding Net Zero Carbon targets. He also highlighted areas where the Academy feels efforts will need to be considerably ‘stepped and scaled up’ to reach the required goals. HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.
Dr Starkey’s webinar presentation followed an opening address by Dame Sue Ion, a Fellow of both the Royal Academy of Engineering and The Royal Society (see pages 19-24), and formed the second ‘half’ of a session titled ‘Decarbonising the NHS in the Context of National Policy’. Dame Sue had looked at the substantial challenges the UK faces in meeting demanding Net Zero carbon emission targets over the next two decades and beyond.
Thanking her for presentation, IHEEM CEO, Pete Sellars, said she had given a ‘fantastic start’ to the webinar, leaving attendees in no doubt as to the size of the challenge across all industries. He said: “This challenge will impact on everyone. We in the NHS and the wider healthcare sector have a huge part to play, and I am delighted that IHEEM is now supporting the work of the Royal Academy of Engineering looking at what the Academy can do from a policy context.” It was thus, he said, ‘his great pleasure’ to hand over to Dr Nick Starkey. He said by way of introduction: “Nick joined the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2018 from the Department of Business, Energy and Industry, where he was a Deputy Director in the Science and Research Directorate, and is now the Policy Lead at the Academy.”
The National Engineering Policy Centre
Dr Starkey began with a little background on his professional background and expertise, and the Academy’s National Engineering Policy Centre (NEPC). He said: “As Pete said just now, we have been trying to put the voice of engineering into some of the policy debates around Net Zero. I am Director of Policy at the Royal Academy of Engineering. The Academy is not only the national academy for engineering in the UK, but also has a global outlook, and I also look after its international partnerships.
Dr Starkey said that Net Zero was actually ‘a leverage point at which you could start a conversation with all the different, divergent interests, and expect to achieve an outcome’.
“We appoint just 50 Fellows annually – every one of them extraordinarily eminent – from a blend of industry and academia, Dame Sue among them.”
Dr Starkey explained that the Academy also worked very closely in partnership with the other engineering institutions, ‘IHEEM included’, in the National Engineering Policy Centre. The speaker said that, from his experience in Whitehall, when the Permanent Secretary had a policy dilemma, it was natural for he or she to turn to 'generalist policy-makers', statisticians, and maybe the Chief Scientist, but he believed there was ‘a lack of appreciation in many parts’ that where the challenges society faced were ‘complex systems-related ones', these were ‘problems of the sort that engineers have an insight into, and can make a contribution to at the design stage of policy’.
Enormous resources to bring He said: “The engineering profession has enormous resources to bring to these challenges. Firstly, we, as the Royal Academy of Engineering, are a national
academy, but we also have the resources and expertise of EngineeringUK, the Engineering Council, and 40 professional engineering institutions.” All that expertise, and the very diverse activities and professional knowledge of these disparate engineering bodies were, however, ‘difficult for Government to grapple with’. “Equally,” Dr Starkey said, “this diversity can make it a challenge for us, as engineering organisations, to work together in a cohesive and conjoined manner. The National Engineering Policy Centre thus presents a single front door via which Government can access the wisdom across the whole of the engineering profession. That might mean we just route Government through specialisms such as IHEEM, or that we collaborate on projects on major issues as a community, drawing on the diverse technical expertise we find in different parts of the profession. “Currently, for example,” he explained, “we have projects ongoing on the safety and ethics of autonomous systems, and a lot of work in hand on resilience and on
June 2021 Health Estate Journal 45
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