In September 2022, the Board of Trustees commissioned a report from the Centre for Governance & Scrutiny. The purpose was two-fold:
- To have an independent audit of the progress we had made in implementing the recommendations of the 2021 Brown Review into the functioning of the Landscape Institute
- To resume the wider review into our New Ways of Working.
The Board received the Report at its meeting on 18 October 2023 and asked the newly established Governance Committee to consider its findings and advise on which recommendations and how these will be taken forward to serve in the best interest of members and Institute. The outstanding work from the Brown review and the agreed recommendations from the CfGS Report will then be combined into a plan which will be consulted on and implemented as part of our Business Plan for 2023/24 and 2024/25.
Our priority is to strengthen the way the different parts of our organisation work together to ensure that members’ views and priorities are at the heart of both our decision-making processes, and our advocacy work on behalf of the profession.
To this end you will have already seen that the Board has kicked off four pieces of priority work to:
- Put all the people that shape our organisation at the heart of decision making
- Improve the way we develop and approve policy and technical guidance and review the roles of different parts of the governance structure in that process
- Examine how to promote more two-way engagement with branches, and how they link to the Advisory Council
- Examine how we meet our public interest role as a self-regulating profession.
These pieces of work will be the foundation of a new decision-making structure and the lynchpin from which all the other recommendations will be actioned. Being part of a committee is not the only way to have a say, and a robust engagement and communications plan will ensure that members can impact decisions through surveys, focus groups, in-person meetings, and more. These new ways of working will make the very best use of all members’ skills and experience put equity, diversity and inclusivity at our core, and enable us to become the profession and Institute that future generations want to be a part of.
