Report of the Council for the session 2002–2003

Abstract

President's foreword. It is a pleasure to introduce another annual report of the Royal Statistical Society, summarizing activities and achievements across all parts of our subject. This impressive document, only a few highlights of which I have space to mention here, is the results of the activities of many hundreds of individual members, most of whose names appear somewhere in it: all deserve our collective thanks for their contributions to furthering the objectives of the Society; promoting and nurturing the discipline and delivering services to members.

Some names deserve special mention, and the first of these is that of our retiring Honorary Treasurer, Vic Barnett, who has served in this office for 10 years, the maximum period allowed in our constitution. He has made many outstanding contributions to the Society in that time, the most visible evidence of which is the Errol Street building: Vic led the initiative to purchase and refurbish the building, a resource which has transformed our activities by providing a real home for the Society: comfortable and convenient meeting space, and decent offices for an expanded staff. At the same time, owning the building has greatly increased our financial standing, through the rise in property values, and the income generated by room letting.

Next, I want to thank Ivor Goddard, and all the staff under his leadership, for their hard work, professionalism and commitment, and their support for me and the other Honorary Officers. During the year, the staff has been restructured to meet the challenges of our current pattern of activities better, and many individuals have had changed portfolios of work. With this, and the disruption of the commissioning of a new information technology system, it is impressive that the delivery of the core activities (journals, meetings and membership servicing generally) has continued so smoothly, while new initiatives continue to be rolled out.

During the session, the recommendations of the governance and structure review were put to ballot by the Fellowship and were decisively accepted (although Fellows voted to retain their title). Implementation of the reorganization is well under way, and the full slate of Honorary Officers for the new session has now been appointed: Deborah Ashby, Ian Dryden, Harvey Goldstein, Denise Lievesley, Greg Phillpotts, Derek Pike, Sylvia Richardson, Mark Robson and Stephen Senn. This is a very strong team, and I am tremendously grateful to all for their willingness to take on their respective themes of Society activity, in partnership with theme managers from among the staff.

The 2002 Society conference, a general meeting held at the University of Plymouth, was an outstanding success, scientifically, socially and financially. For the first time, we appointed a dedicated Programme Chair, Valerie Isham, and the resulting integration of ideas between and within sessions made it a rewarding experience. We are indebted to Valerie, and to the Chair of the Local Organizing Committee, Julian Stander. There have been many other highlights among our meetings, with a wide-ranging programme of Ordinary Meetings, including one held in the Canadian Rockies. There have been several topical special meetings, and an outstanding Beveridge Lecture in May on the theme of social inequality in health, delivered by Sir Michael Marmot.

The session saw the first of the Graduate Training Programme intensive short courses for post-graduate students, organized by the Research Section, and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Economic and Social Research Council; this is an on-going initiative which should substantially strengthen the research training of our post-graduates and is also an excellent model for further partnerships with research councils to nurture our discipline.

The final event that I want to highlight here is the completion of the review of the Society's pub-lications, by a team led by Sylvia Richardson. After extensive consultation by correspondence, through the pages of RSS News and at the Plymouth conference, their report was submitted to Council in October 2002, where it was accepted enthusiastically. From 2004, the journal will be refocused into three series instead of four, with revised remits, and a magazine introduced, aimed to have a broad appeal across the Society, and especially to professional statisticians. I am extremely grateful to the review team, and to the journal Editors for their unselfish co- operation in working to ensure continuity of coverage of the subject with the revised series remits, and I welcome Helen Joyce as the magazine Editor. This is an exciting development: I am confident that almost all Fellows will find that the publications that we provide will better meet their needs.

I hope that my successor, Andy Grieve, finds the Presidency of this remarkable Society as interesting and rewarding as I have. Peter Green