EDITORIAL

Greetings from the new editorial team. We hope you enjoy this issue of News & Views, but whether you do or do not, we shall be pleased to hear from you with your comments, criticisms, suggestions, letters, draft articles and anything else you would like to send – provided it’s printable! Here is one topic we would like you to write to us about:

The Branch surgery on 8 September has been cancelled. We needed at least 16 participants to make the event worthwhile, but not even that number of our over 700 members were prepared to come. This is the second year running that the Branch has had to cancel a surgery through a lack of support. Why?

Under the Chartered Institute’s Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Scheme attendance once every three years at an arbitrator’s surgery (or equivalent approved training event) is compulsory, on pain of exclusion from the Institute’s panels. Attendance at one arbitrator’s surgery is a requirement of pupillage. So, on the face of it, it is surely surprising that less than 16 members in the South East Region are willing to attend for two years in succession.

It is certainly not for the Editors of New & Views, nor even for your Branch Committee, to dictate to you, the members, how you should spend your hard-earned spare time. Understandably you want more of it, not less! But your Committee would be genuinely glad to know how you see things. Why is it that so few of you want to attend an event, run by no less than the current President of the Institute, that would have been fun as well as a necessary part of our continuing professional development?

Was the date wrong (perhaps many of you are still on holiday in early September)? Would you have preferred a weekday to a Saturday? Was the venue at Reigate unattractive or inconvenient? Was the cost – approaching £100 – a deterrent? Do you look elsewhere than in the Region for your arbitration training? If so, where?

Or is the problem more fundamental? Do you regard the Institute’s CPD Scheme as misguided or irrelevant? Is membership of the Institute’s panels not important to you? Or do you not believe the Institute to be serious in its professed commitment to CPD and raising the professional standards of arbitrators?

Whichever of these may be the reason for your deciding not to come to the Branch surgery planned for September please let us know why you did so decide – and if you have any other ideas for improving the Branch’s programme of events. The Committee wants to arrange the events the members want to attend; so do send us a short letter or e-mail with your comments (addresses at the front of this issue).

Roger Clarke

Peter Horne

Charles Stimpson