by Graham Parker
Tim Balderston, new president of the ISVA, has claimed a merger with the RICS is back on the agenda following Christopher Jonas’ Hamptons lecture last year.
But he made it clear that having rejected merger proposals once before, the ball was now very much in the RICS’ court. “The RICS should consider the views of its members to find out if they have changed in the past eight years,” he said. Having been jilted in 1989, he said, the ISVA is clearly wary about staging a reconciliation. “We don’t wish to have a re-run of that,” Balderston told EG. And he said that the ISVA would not put the issue to its membership “until the RICS can demonstrate that it has a mandate for a merger”.
However, RICS chief executive Claire Makin said that there were no plans for a formal consultation exercise. “It’s not strictly on our agenda,” she said.
At the 1989 vote, the RICS failed to secure the necessary majority in favour of merger because a significant minority of its membership felt that their status would be undermined by bringing in ISVA members who had qualified by experience.
But Balderston said that he would expect any new merger proposal to be on entirely different terms: “There can be no doubt that the UK government now recognises full professional membership of the ISVA to be of an equivalent level to that of the RICS.” However, he insisted that the ISVA would not go down the RICS route of full graduate entry. “We have always believed that where you start from is not important: where you finish is the point.”
Balderston emphasised that a merger would be worthwhile only if it created a whole bigger than the sum of its constituent parts. In particular, he would like any merged body to give greater weight to the general and rural practice areas.
