The information provided, by our auditors,
Baker Tilly early in the year gave us both
short and long-term projections for our
financial situation, showed that the "belt
tightening" was going to be far more
significant than originally anticipated.
The Trustees have therefore discussed the
necessary steps to take, to re-create a
sound financial base from which to build
and this has involved a number of changes
at the Leighton Buzzard office. The first of
these changes was set out in the
March/April issue of Corrosion
Management, which involved the initial
reduction in the staff, with the departure of
Linda Upcraft, which resulted in a
significant workload for Anna Heath. This
situation has now been overcome by the
introduction of a contracted out specialist
team of admin personnel who will be able
to cope with the diverse range of
membership, financial and secretarial
.activities, as well as assisting the Branches
and providing membership services during
the constantly changing "peak and trough"
work load requirements.
It is therefore necessary for Anna to
relinquish her full time job to allow us to
provide a much more flexible staffing
arrangement at Corrosion House. I would
like personally to thank Anna for the
support she has given me in the few
months of my period of office and also the
help that she has provided my
predecessors over her seven-year period
with ICorr.
The detail of the changes will be outlined
to the full council meeting to be held on
the 25th June and more detailed
information will be provided for you in the
next issue of Corrosion Management to
keep the membership fully informed.
You will see elsewhere in this issue that we
have in our archive store, large quantities
of CD's, which cover all of the UK
Corrosion Conferences and some of the
joint EuroCorr events between 1982 and
2002, We are offering these to members at
significantly discounted prices and I hope
that every member decides to take
advantage of this offer to have access to-
20-years diverse technical information.
In my January New Year message, I also
gave an undertaking to visit as many
Branches and Committees as possible
and although my professional workload
has been at a high level during the first
quarter of this year, 1 have managed to
"show my face" at a number of Branch
daytime and evening meetings, I was
pleased to be able to attend the North
West Branch open meeting where the
presentation of a Young Authors Award
was an excellent initiative and I was
pleased to be able to sit on the
assessment panel and present the award
to the successful winner.
I was also able to attend the one-day
Seminar organised by the Irish Branch
and in addition to presenting a paper I
also sat in on the Branch Committ&e
Meeting, I paid a fleeting visit to the
successful Aberdeen Branch evening
meeting on my way to St. Fergus to install
an ICorr qualified painting inspector on
behalf of MobiL
Over the coming weeks, I hope to attend
the North West Branch Annual Dinner, as
well as the London Branch River Trip on
the 26th June to Hampton Court.
Regarding the publicity, which followed
the announcement in the last issue of
Corrosion Management, in the section "
Letters to the Editor", I am pleased to say
that a number of major companies and
projects have since decided to use
qualified Institute of Corrosion Inspectors
to look after their projects, Both Mobil St
Fergus, on the Sage Project and
Lancashire County Council on the
Winstanley Bridge are using Level 2 ICorr
Painting Inspectors. This qualification was
also the minimum inspection standard
required for the new Eurcstar Terminal at
St Panoras in London. I am pleased that
there has been such a good response to the excellent work being carried ;ouE on
the Coating Inspector Certification
Scheme and ] think it goes to prove the
point "there's no such thing as bad
publicity".
UK Corrosion 2003 (Harrogate 28th, 29th
and 3C}th October) promises to be a major
Coatings Conference and Exhibition. In
previous issues of Corrosion
Management, the 3, one-day themes
have been outlined, which cover steel
bridges, frood gates and immersed
structures and chemical and power plant
protection, they will embrace all aspects
of' coatings and surface preparation. In
addition to major organisations such as
the Highways Agency, the Forth Road
Bridge Management Board, the
Environment Agency Thames Barrier, the
event has been strengthened on the
bridges side by the agreement of Railtrack
to present a paper on their changing
specifications for coating structures,
In addition to the protection of steel
structures theme, a parallel session will be
held on the third day on corrosion
protecrion of concrete structures. Plans
are also in place to arrange a Concrete.
Society/Institute of Corrosion Technical
Commfttee meeting to broaden the
coatings application spectrum,
Since this event is going to incorporate the
Annual Institute Dinner following the AGM
on the 29th October, I would like all
members to put this date in their diaries
now, so that we can all support the Institute
at this major technical/social event.