Progress

The Membership consultation is well underway - see detailed update below

Getting Council agreement to the detail, to enable legal drafting

As promised, I have created a website for Council (I promise this is the last one) - this will have everything Council needs, in one place.

The three websites we have now are:

• The new Council website.  https://www.rcpecouncilgov24.com/
• This one, for the Working Group - https://www.rcpegovernance2324.com/ 
• The Membership Consultation website - https://www.rcpefuturegov.com/

I have brought together all the detail which underpins the main decisions of the Governance Review, and loaded it all into the Council website. This is described more fully below.

EDI and Trustee duties

Council asked for a more detailed description of the options. I have worked with Kenneth on this, following very helpful conversations with Mark, Angela and Kerri. We will have a paper ready for the April Council - it will be here, as part of the Council website. There is a question about handling, set out below, for the Working Group to discuss.

Next steps

As discussed with Council at previous meetings, Council will not be asked to vote on or actively agree to every single detail of the updated Laws. Instead:

• All the detail will be available to Council, and any member of Council can ask questions about anything
• We will highlight particularly interesting or possibly controversial topics to Council, to ask for agreement - for example, reasons to remove a Trustee, or a Fellow/Member.

I will make sure that I send the website round in plenty of time (ie before the actual meeting paper deadline) to give members of Council as much opportunity as possible to absorb the detail and raise concerns.

We could really do with a whole hour at the next Council meeting, as this is the last opportunity to go through questions, before Council asks Brodies to start drafting. Will this be possible?

Feedback has been either positive, or asking a question - this is a great relief.

Everyone has had a personal reply. Questions which might be relevant to other F&M have been added to the FAQ of the Member consultation website.  

Here is the summary of all the Q&A so far.

Still to come:

• Angela and Lucy did two online Q&A, which were quite sparsely attended but were very cheery! (Thank you again to Angela, for giving up that time).
• Andy, Angela and Lucy will do a real-life Q&A at the Senior Fellows' Club on March 25th.
• Mark and Lucy have two more Q&A lined up, on March 25th.
• Lucy will hold a focus group (or two, if there is no one suitable date) for particularly keen F&M, to talk for longer.

What word should I use instead of "physician", when I need to draw a distinction between Lay Trustees and Trustees who have or have had a medical career of some kind? I'm asking because I think that some Fellows are not physicians even though they are in the RCPE, and I want to make sure I don't accidentally exclude anyone from anything.

Clinician Trustees? Medic Trustees?

This hasn't been an issue in the College for a while, but my understanding is that there is an expectation that the President Elect would normally join Council immediately after the AGM, and be a Trustee, but would not take up the President role until January of the following year - this is a period of time to see how the Presidency works.

Is that right? And if so, is it still what you want? At the moment, there is no mention of the PE anywhere in the new structure.

I think the main options are:

ONE

Simple and easy, but different - the new President simply takes up their role at the start of the governance year. There is no shadow period - although, of course, there should be a handover.

TWO

Harder, but with no change to explain or try to "sell" to people:

• we make the Presidential term different to everyone else's (ie not starting at the beginning of the governance year, but in January) and
• we think of a reason why this only applies to the President, and not to any of the other very demanding roles!
• we increase the maximum Board size by one, to make room for this role

or, as a variant of Option Two, the PE term is a whole year, with consequential amendments to maximum consecutive term limits elsewhere in the Laws.

What does the Working Group think?

This is the final significant chunk of work needed in order to have something good to present to Fellows and Members at the AGM in September. It's not the end of the project, as there will be implementation (of course) and also creating the Regulations, if the F&M agree this. But it is, at least, the beginning of the end.

I have created the following sections on the Council website:

A home page, with includes some useful (I hope) background

Introduction to the detail, which summarises what is in each main area

Detail about Council

Detail about the Board of Trustees

Detail about Membership rights, privileges, obligations and fees

Detail about Membership meetings

Administration (this isn't finished yet, sorry - no need to look at the moment)

And

A page for the EDI/Trustee duties discussion, which I will load up when Kenneth and I have finished the thinking.

A page for brand new content - mainly Conflicts of Loyalty, and Trustee Benefits text, which Brodies will provide

A Resources area, with OSCR guidance, the legislation, the current Charter, and all the previous Council papers on the governance review

The main request for the Working Group here is to go to the introduction to the decisions area of the Council website, then click through to each separate detail area, and give feedback on anything still outstanding - I've highlighted these decisions in red.   

The fully detailed paper on this is nearly ready - we (Kenneth and Lucy) are waiting for some further legal advice. It will be ready for the Council meeting on April 12th, and I will put it on the website that I have created for Council.

If any members of the Working Group had time to review it before it is circulated, that would be great. The main update since the version you discussed in January is an attempt to find a more creative solution to the challenge of "guaranteeing" someone's role.

At our meeting on Monday, it would be good to briefly discuss how to handle this paper at Council. There is a danger that this topic (which is really very niche, and will only very occasionally happen in real life) will take up a disproportionate amount of time at Council. The outcome we really need at the April meeting is an agreement that the underpinning detail of all the other parts of the update to the Laws is acceptable, so that Brodies can start drafting.