According to the CITB, the new governance structure it revealed this week – an eight-strong board supported by a 21-strong advisory council – brings it into step with current thinking in other public sector bodies.
A spokesman told Construction Manager that the two-part structure, replacing the former 21-member board, followed the same model recently adopted at British Waterways.
The old board had been heavily criticised for being unwieldy, and for including only one woman, former deputy chairman Judy Lowe.
The new board has the distinction of having five women to just three men, while the gender diversity of the council is five women and 15 men with one position still to be filled. Both the board and the council will be chaired by CITB chairman James Wates.
Advisory council members include Philip Hall MCIOB, managing director of Oxfordshire-based chartered building contractor Hall Construction; Alison Watson, founder of the Class of Your Own schools curriculum on construction; and Ian Dickerson, head of training and new entrants at Kier.
Dickerson told Construction Manager: "The council is there to represent the industry as a whole, it’s made up of a reasonably broad spectrum of the industry. The old board was unwieldy for sure, and it had a training committee under it that itself had twenty members – I used to sit on it. But I don’t know how effective it was at looking at the future direction of the industry, often it is was doing no more than rubber-stamping what the grant committee was doing.
"So I see this as a completely clean sheet, and an opportunity for the CITB to say, ‘this is what the purpose of CITB is’."
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Other names on the advisory council include John Lorimer, formerly capital programme director at Manchester City Council and now an independent consultant, and Mark Wusthoff FCIOB, an operations manager/project director at Bouygues UK and chair of the Welsh branch of CIOB.
Asked what the relationship between the board and council would be, the CITB spokesmen said that the details would be resolved by the board once it has its first meeting in early February.
The spokesman said: “The detail has got to be worked out by the board, but we expect the council is there to provide advice and guidance on strategic issues, and also provide a picture of what’s happening in the industry, and how it feels about various things. It will also have the opportunity to comment on the business plan and business planning cycle.
“The board will have the option of not taking their advice on board, but it’s highly unlikely they’d ignore the views of the broader industry.”
Seddon training and education executive Roy Cavanagh told Construction News that the CITB’s new women-dominated board was a “massive statement” that would encourage schools and colleges to take a different view of the industry.
“[Educators] should look at this and think, although [construction] is a male-dominated industry on the face of it, with five women on the CITB board, it’s sending out a message that this is an industry that welcomes and wants more females.”
However, Construction Industry Council chief executive Graham Watts told Construction News that the new system might be less effective than the old. “I think they’ve gone from one extreme to another. If two or three people don’t turn up, you’ve got a board of four people. How is that an effective board of governance?
