Trustee board update – November 2025

During my first trustee board meeting as president, I was delighted to welcome our new trustees Andrew McNaughton, Yvonne Murphy and Andrew Enston.

ICE performance

ICE trustees regularly review the organisation’s performance to ensure we are on track to deliver against our annual plan.

Due to the timing of the meeting, the update provided covered performance through to the end of Q3 2025.

Trustees were happy to see that the institution’s activities remain broadly on track.

Downloads of the 2025 State of the Nation report continue to track well, and the refreshed Knowledge Hub looks to be well received as it's outperforming the previous version with increasingly higher traffic in the last few months.

We also noted that the ICE content continued to perform well on LinkedIn. Our presence at UK party conferences was well received as was the international Enabling Better Infrastructure conference in early October, which I had the pleasure of closing on behalf of Jim Hall, who was unable to attend. 

Membership numbers are broadly on track but the migration to the new membership management system has meant some delays in the usual reporting.

When properly up and running, the new system will help the ICE to be more efficient and effective. As with any project of this scale, there have been some teething issues, but these are being addressed, and your patience is appreciated.

2026 budget and plan 

As you will have seen, the ICE 2026-2030 strategy has now been published.

The strategy responds to the urgent challenges presented by climate change, technological disruption and aims to create an industry that is:

• Trusted – delivering safe, functional and inclusive infrastructure
• Sustainable – carbon management, nature positive solutions and climate resilience are embedded in infrastructure around the world
• Intelligent – engineers use technology intelligently and ethically 

As the foundational year for the new strategy, the focus during 2026 will be to incorporate these themes into all of the ICE’s activities. 

We will be looking at how the ICE can engage and empower its networks, continue to develop a diverse and innovative membership base and reinforce its position as a trusted and impartial source of expertise.

These themes run through all the activity planned for 2026, which balances focusing on our core activities of qualifying and providing lifelong learning to civil and infrastructure engineers with new areas of research into the role of AI and the creation of new standards on adaptation pathways and productivity. 

Trustees provided their feedback on the plan and signed off the budget envelope for 2026, which includes funding to rebuild the ICE website. Work on this will start in the new year.

I'm looking forward to working with the trustee board, the ICE team and members around the world to deliver on our vision of creating a world where infrastructure genuinely enables people and the planet to thrive.