Royal College Day 2025 speeches: Lizzie Lockett, RCVS Chief Executive Officer

Good morning everyone and a very warm welcome to Royal College Day, it’s great to be back at One Great George Street again.Ok, start your stopwatches, I have eight minutes to summarise 365 days in the life of the College: hang on to your hats!

I think the question I have been asked more than any other in the last few years is ‘when do you move into the new building’? And I am delighted to now be able to say – we are in!

Some photos of our lovely new building will now play on the screen behind while I describe Hardwick Street, our refurbished Edwardian warehouse space, to you.

Thanks to an enormous amount of work led by our Director of Operations, Corrie McCann, with support from our project manager Gary Barlow, our design and build company, Peldon Rose, and a whole host of experts, we took the keys to our beautifully refurbished space in April. Staff came in during May, and we held our first hearing and first Council meeting in June – at the same time! – something that would not have been possible in our old building, which was one of the reasons why we moved in the first place.

There will be a formal opening in the autumn, once the walls aren’t quite so bare, but for now we are enjoying being in a space that is designed expressly for our needs, with a members’ room, an events floor, space for our library and historic collection, and offices, including Teams booths, communal areas, and a multifaith room.

There is a dedicated suite of rooms that can be used for hearings or committees, and a large flexible room suitable for council meetings on the top floor – alongside the best bit – a fabulous roof terrace with a breath-taking skyline view that showcases the old alongside the new, in that way London does so spectacularly.

It's a great office space – but it’s also your College, so please do come and visit.

It’s been a decade since we started the process of reviewing our space needs, and five years since we put Belgravia House on the market, right at the start of the pandemic. The Facilities and IT teams have moved us in and out of four offices since then, and although we have had temporary space, we have not had our own for a long time. So huge thanks to the staff team who have accepted this uncertainty with their trademark grace, flexibility and good spirit.

The new building is already bringing people together – whether that’s staff reconnecting by playing slow Jenga across the lunchbreaks, visitors from the Singapore government coming to chat to us about best practice in veterinary regulation, colleagues from other medical regulators discussing areas of mutual interest over coffee, or our Council and committee members catching up in person during a meeting break.

And coming together – being stronger together – is the theme of our new strategic plan, approved by Council in March.

Our last plan focused on compassionate regulation. That was not a common concept back in 2020, although the number of compassion-focused groups and initiatives that have sprung up in the regulatory world since maybe mean we were ahead of the game.

With the new plan, we are going ‘back to the future’, although no DeLoreans were involved. Taking its inspiration from our motto of 1844 – vis unita fortior – we are stronger together – the new plan recognises our unique role as a royal college that regulates, and the ability that gives us to work a holistic way. To make sure that veterinary professionals are fit to practise and the veterinary professions are fit for purpose.

This special role gives us the opportunity to hold the space – figuratively and now physically - for conversations not just about setting and maintaining veterinary standards, but also around the role of veterinary professionals in one health, societal expectations of professionals, career development and satisfaction, and working culture.

And while there are organisations to support veterinary professionals, and there are those to support consumer interests, we are the only one with the ability to bring all sides together, in the interests of animal health and welfare, and public health.

The focus on relationships, and understanding how to bridge gaps between standards and practice through discussion, is a form of relational regulation – which doesn’t just mean that I get to regulate my brother, although that’s always been a good side perk of this job! The new strategy, developed with the input of Council, staff, and stakeholders, outlines what actions to support this model of relational regulation might look like over the next few years, via four workstreams.

Stronger together with:

• Veterinary professionals
• Animal owners and keepers
• Society at large
• And, with our staff and governance teams.

We are developing the first operational plan at present, and you can read the full strategy online.

I mentioned DeLoreans just now, and Back to the Future. Back in 2016, I received a Blu-ray edition of the Back to the Future trilogy, delivered anonymously, to the office. I have still to this day no idea who sent it to me. A future version of myself knowing I needed help with theme of the 2025 strategy plan, encouraging me to draw on our history?

So had there really been a helpful future version of myself, she might have popped back to the September 2023 version, at the moment of opening an email announcing the start of a Competition and Markets Authority review into the veterinary profession. I was in a meeting room in Telford the day before our September Council meeting, I remember it very well.

I might have heard that 2023 Lizzie say – ‘ah this is probably just about the corporate practices, and it'll all be over by Christmas’. And future me would probably have shaken her head wearily and had something to say about that….

Of course, as you all know, that initial review turned into an investigation, and the focus on corporate practice turned into a much wider root and branch consideration of small animal practice, including our role as regulator.

And it’s not over yet – in fact it just got six months longer. It’s been an interesting time. 

Many of the findings – not yet conclusive – would support our own feelings about the need for change: principally, a new veterinary surgeons – or veterinary services – act.

For us, new legislation means mandatory practice regulation, recognition of the title veterinary nurse and greater powers for nurses, scope for regulation of the wider veterinary team and a more modern approach to fitness to practise, among other things.

However, the CMA’s proposed remedies go much wider than the need for new legislation, with a 162-page document outlining 28 remedies being published recently. We are fully supportive of increasing information available to consumers so that they can make informed choices. But we are wary of  encouraging ‘vetting by numbers’ by being too prescriptive, and also overburdening practices in a way that leads to increased costs for clients and/or a reduction in the availability of veterinary care. We have made these points to the CMA and we have been pleased throughout this process with the openness with which their team have received our comments and listened to our concerns. Watch this space, as they say.

Meanwhile on the legislative reform front, Defra has been leading bi-weekly meetings since January looking in detail at what assurances legislation needs to provide for society and animal owners, whilst empowering veterinary professionals to deliver. Our Council’s proposals have framed these conversations but it’s important to remember that, ultimately, it’s for Defra - and parliament – to decide if there will be new legislation, what might go into it, and which body will be tasked with delivering against it.

Meanwhile, despite all of the additional time taken by these externally-driven projects, your College staff team have continued to forge ahead with some really innovative projects of our own, including our ground-breaking Veterinary Clinical Careers Pathway project, veterinary workforce modelling, reasonable adjustments for veterinary and veterinary nursing students, publication of our Surveys of the Professions, celebrating the third anniversary of our RCVS Academy, with 35 courses now available for free, our new customer relationship management system nearing completion, which will help improve our efficiency and effectiveness, our website redevelopment ongoing, the inspiring VN Visions initiative delivering its first report, and – and this one personally very welcome for me - our new Registrar Clare Paget joining the team at the end of March. Clare has certainly joined us at a busy time and is contributing hugely already.

And that’s not even mentioning the huge amount of ‘business as usual’, that we all take for granted, in regulating a profession of over 38,000 veterinary surgeons and 25,000 veterinary nurses, and a Practice Standards Scheme encompassing over 3,700 practice premises.

There is an expression that ‘regulatory success is silent’ – and while we have had more than our fair share of publicity this year on issues that arise due to our outdated legislation, a lot of positive stuff does goes unheard. So my heartfelt thanks to all of the staff in the room, and those at their desks today, keeping the show on the road.

Thank you also to everyone involved in supporting this work, including our Council and committee members, those who sit on the legion of subcommittees, working parties and boards that provide governance and oversight, all of the examiners, VetGDP assessors and members of our Public Advisory Group. You all play a vital role in setting and maintaining standards, so that animal owners and society at large can feel confident about veterinary care, and the safety of the meat and animal products that they eat.

Finally, a huge thank you to my Senior Team, who have all worked above and beyond this year. I sometimes joke that I wish they could be a little less good at their jobs, so that the problems they bring me are easier to solve – but no, only the most difficult issues are escalated – thanks for that folks, I think…..!

And to the Officer team – Sue, Tim, Belinda, Tshidi and Linda – thank you for all of your support and guidance. Linda in particular has been an exceptional President. Always well-researched, clear, curious and supportive. Thank you. 

Every year at this time, I think ‘this has been a tricky one, next year will be easier’.  And somewhere, future Lizzie is listening in, going ‘ha, hold my beer’….

Thank you.