News Release

29th April 2002

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY BOARD

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.