David Bland: revitalised insurance education

David Bland, who has passed away at the 85 after a long illness, revitalised the Chartered Insurance Institute during the 1990s when he led it as director-general. In doing so, he took insurance education into a new era.

He came to the role after an already illustrious career in academia, having studied and taught economics and economic history at the University of Sheffield for over 20 years, serving as Dean of Social Sciences and then Pro-Vice Chancellor between 1984 and 1988.

He arrived at the CII in 1989 when the organisation was at a crossroads. Its examinations were looking outdated and the rapid growth of the emerging financial advice sector was passing it by. He also inherited an increasingly bitter dispute about how the newly created title of Chartered Insurer was going to be applied, with many senior members of the profession being denied it because they were granted Fellowship before examinations were introduced in 1963. His almost immediate decision to push through their eligibility for the Chartered title won him many valuable allies among the more influential members of the profession.

This gave him the mandate he needed to overhaul the examinations, bringing in new qualifications for financial advisers and other staff who were not going to aspire to full professional qualifications. This came just at the right time, and the CII enjoyed a new lease of life – and a considerable boost to its finances – by examining tens of thousands of staff who would not previously have come into its orbit but who now had a suite of respected qualifications they could aspire to. This also suited the new era of more prescriptive regulation which was then dawning.

He won support for these major changes through the intellectual rigour he brought to the role and the always admirable clarity with which he advocated the changes, often winning over a previously sceptical membership. He was deservedly honoured with an OBE in 1998.

In my various roles at what was then Post Magazine, I covered all these debates in great detail and came to know David well as the critical friend our respective roles demanded.

Return to academia
After leaving the CII in 1990, he returned to academia as head of the business school at the University of East London for a few years before taking on various roles as a consumer champion for the water and postal services sectors. He remained a prominent figure in the insurance market, however, writing several books including Principles and Practice of Insurance, which was eventually published in 14 languages.

It was in his capacity as the incoming President of the Insurance Charities that he invited me to lunch at the Athenaeum Club. I had already helped them with some of their marketing and communications activities and had recently become a trustee.

The two Davids
We both knew that one of the biggest challenges the organisation faced was the urgent need to simplify the complex mix of legacy charities that sat under its relatively recent marketing banner of The Insurance Charities. There was a Benevolent Fund and an Orphans’ Fund (the industry had once wanted to build its own orphanage), as well as a couple of large personal legacies separately managed. The terms of reference of these all dated back to before the Second World War and were feeling increasingly restrictive, hampering the ability of the organisation to meet the new demands being placed on it.

Sorting this out was not going to be easy and, knowing the speed with which the Charity Commission worked, was definitely going to take more than one year, the term of office of a President.

Our solution devised over that lunch was simple: I would succeed David as President and our shared objective would be to deliver a merger of the underlying charities and a new constitution in two years. That we did, one David quietly replacing the other halfway through that process.

We kept in touch over the years and he did me the honour of asking me to review some of his books, always a joy as well as an intellectual challenge.

He was a great servant of economic education, the insurance industry and the Livery movement.

Requiescat in Pace.