Michael Fabricant has been appointed to the Engineering and Technology Board
(‘ETB’) as a Director. The directorship is unpaid. The Board has been
established with the support of the Department of Trade and Industry to
promote engineering and technology in the United Kingdom and strengthen
links between the engineering institutions, the academic world, and
industry.

"Engineering and technology are still the Cinderella professions in the
United Kingdom with too few talented youngsters choosing to study these
subjects at university", says Michael Fabricant. "While law and medicine
are popular subjects in the UK, engineering enjoys equal status in
countries like Germany and Japan. My aim – and that of the ETB – is to
raise the status of engineering in the UK. Britain has a huge pool of
talent and if engineering is unable to exploit it in the future, we shall
see the total demise of high technology manufacturing in our country. The
ETB aims to reverse this trend. I will also continue to raise these
important issues in Parliament".

Michael Fabricant is a Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers and
prior to his being elected to Parliament in 1992, he was a director and
co-founder of an international broadcast engineering and finance group which
set up radio stations in 48 countries around the world. Michael is one of
only 6 Chartered Engineers out of the 659 MPs in the House of Commons. In
the past, he has promoted Bills in the House of Commons to raise the status
of engineers in society. One such Bill would have protected the title
‘engineer’ in the same way as architects and solicitors are protected making
it illegal to claim to be an engineer unless the individual was a fully
qualified chartered engineer which now requires a good honours or
postgraduate degree in engineering.

The Board of the ETB, which Michael joins, consists of 14 members and is
chaired by Sir Peter Williams, who is currently Master of St Catherine’s
College Oxford, and Chairman of the UK’s National Museum of Science and
Industry, Director of GKN plc, President of the Institute of Physics, and
is the former Chairman of Oxford Instruments plc.

Other directors include Sir Joseph Dwyer, The Institution of Civil
Engineers; Keith Read, The Institute of Marine Engineering, Science and
Technology; Martin Temple, EEF, Engineering Employers’ Federation; Michael
Sanderson, EMTA, National Training Organisation for Engineering Manufacture;
Mandy Mayer, DTI; Michael Kipp, BAE Systems; Iain Sturrock, Nortel; Alastair
Macdonald, British Computer Society; Professor Patrick Dowling, University
of Surrey; and Andrew Ramsay of the Engineering Council.