Chair's report
27 January 2004
BOARD RESTRUCTURING
The most important responsibility that I have had since the last Board meeting was to manage the process and chair the selection panel for the appointment of four new non-industry members of the IWF Board.
Following our review of governance, it was decided that the Board should be somewhat smaller - instead of the chair and 12 members, the chair and nine members (six non-industry and three industry). As a result of people moving on and stepping down, we had four non-industry vacancies to fill.
Another outcome of the review of governance was agreement that we would follow regulatory best practice by filling any non-industry vacancies through an open and transparent system of appointment. Therefore these four vacancies have been filled through a process involving search consultants called Hudson Global Resources and advertisements in the national press.
Our new constitution states that:
"The non-industry members will be chosen by an open selection procedure managed by a sub-committee of the Board comprising the Chair, representation from both non-industry and industry Board membership, and an independent person from outside the Board agreed by the other sub-committee members".
Therefore the interview panel comprised me as IWF Chair, Jim Reynolds as the non-industry member, Camille de Stempel as the industry member, and Baroness Valerie Howarth (former Chief Executive of ChildLine) as the independent member. We were assisted by Paul Ballard of Hudson.
A total of 65 applications were received; Hudson conducted preliminary interviews with 16 individuals; and the full panel interviewed 11 people over two days.
Our new constitution further states:
"In making its choice, the sub-committee will ensure that the Board has an appropriate balance of skills and experience and include members with expertise in child protection, criminal justice, technical matters and assessment of criminally racist material".
In the event, in spite of special efforts including contact with the Commission for Racial Equality, nobody with an ethnic minority background of a sufficient standard applied for the posts and therefore the panel was not able to select anyone with special expertise on criminally racist material - but this is a very small element of the IWF's work. We were able to select someone with a specialist knowledge of criminal justice. The other three individuals appointed all have a broad involvement in child protection, but they have very different backgrounds and expertise.
The legal person is Ian Walden who is Head of the Institute of Computer and IT Law Unit at the Centre for Commercial Law Studies at Queen Mary University. The three colleagues with a child protection focus are: Chris Atkinson who is a qualified social worker now holding the post of Policy Adviser at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Tink Palmer who has been a child care consultant and is now Principal Policy & Practice Officer at Barnardo's, and Michele Elliott who is the Founder and Director of Kidscape, a charity with a similar staffing and budget to IWF which is concerned with the personal safety of children.
These four colleagues now join Jim Reynolds and Sonia Livingstone as non-industry Board members. The Funding Council has agreed that, at least until a further electoral process, the three industry representatives on the Board will be Nick Truman, Howard Lamb and Mark Gracey.
All the new appointees took office on 1 January 2004. All of them have been given an induction programme by the office and had a one-to-one discussion with me. I warmly welcome each of them to the IWF Board.
The final point to make about Board matters is that, following our review of governance, we now have an Executive Committee which meets quarterly in advance of the full Board meeting. The Committee met in January and its deliberations have been fed into the various papers for this Board meeting.
The Committee comprises the Chair and Vice-Chairs and the Board will need to determine who the Vice-Chairs will now be in the context of the new membership of the Board.
OTHER INTERNAL MATTERS
I was pleased to chair the selection panel that interviewed candidates for the new General Manager post and chose Tony Fagelman for the position. I have enjoyed working with him and the new Communications Co-ordinator Fay MacDonald since their appointments. As part of my role as a bridge between the staff and the Board, I attended the staff Christmas dinner and made a routine visit to the Oakington offices.
EXTERNAL RELATIONS
Since the last Board meeting, I have been involved in a number of media maters, notably:
- an interview with BBC Radio Cambridge on child safety on the Internet as we approached Christmas when many parents buy PCs for their children
- a live television interview with Sky News about the recent NCH report on child abuse in the context of the Internet
- a letter to the "Observer" on the nature and timing of the contacts with IWF made by the rock star Pete Townshend.
Having previously given evidence to a study into independent regulators carried out by the Better Regulation Task Force, I was invited to the launch of the Task Force’s report on this subject which was addressed by the chair of the relevant sub-group Deirdre Hutton.
Finally, since our last Board meeting, the new communications regulator Ofcom has assumed full powers and, together with our Chief Executive, I attended the official launch of Ofcom at its offices at Riverside House. Although Ofcom will not be regulating the Internet, issues like convergence and media literacy will require us to work closely together and we should welcome the opportunity to work with a new partner on these issues. The process should be assisted by my appointment as a member of the Ofcom Consumer Panel.
ROGER DARLINGTON
15 January 2004
Page Created: Thu, October 7th, 2004
Page Modified: Wed, October 20th, 2004
