The President of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors has written to Dame Janet Pareskeva, OBE, the Head of the Institution’s Standards and Regulation Board and in effect required her resignation. This creates a new situation in the regulation of professions in Britain. As the Editor has kindly invited me to comment from outside the surveyors’ profession, this new loss of regulation for surveyors seems an important topic.

Writing as a doctor, regulation in the health professions is very different. Most regulatory organisations for the health professions follow those that developed in the medical profession in 1858. These arrangements differ substantially from those in the surveying profession. In the health-care world there are usually three separate national organisations each dealing with three important functions: national regulation in the public interest, professional standard setting, and a union function for pay and conditions. In medicine the General Medical Council (GMC) is the regulator, the Medical Royal Colleges are the standard setters, and the British Medical Association (BMA) is a registered trade union.

There are core principles underlying this tripartite arrangement and a substantial literature including the Merrison Report (1975) and a book, the title of which, tellingly, includes the words “public trust” (Irvine, 2003) and many articles by Sir Donald Irvine (Irvine, 2001), an international expert on professional regulation. Professions are important and in Britain have considerable powers but professionals are human and without regulation a minority of professionals take advantage of the public and a small minority disgrace their profession. Conflicts of interest are inevitable and occur in all professions. Bernard Shaw (1906) wrote of professions being “a conspiracy against the laity.”