Nick Baveystock is Director General of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE). Nick is from an engineering family and, after schooling in England and France, he joined the British Army in 1985 and was commissioned into the Royal Engineers. His early career was spent in Germany or on operations in Northern Ireland and the Balkans. After attending the Army Staff College at Camberley, he spent two years in London working for the Director of Military Operations, before commanding a Royal Engineer Squadron. He returned to the Ministry of Defence in 1999, this time as personal staff officer to the Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff (Operations). On promotion to Lieutenant Colonel he spent 8 months in Kosovo as the personal staff officer to the Commander of NATO forces in Kosovo.

At the beginning of 2002 he assumed command of 35 Engineer Regiment based in Paderborn in Germany and during his command the Regiment was deployed in Kosovo, Bosnia, and for 2003-04 in Southern Iraq. Promoted to Colonel in 2004 he served as Commander Royal Engineers 1st (UK) Armoured Division deploying to Iraq again, this time as Chief of Staff Multinational Division (South East) in 2005-06, and thereafter as Chief Engineer also in Iraq in 2006. Nick attended the Royal College of Defence Studies in 2007 before a year managing officers’ careers, promotions and HR Policy in the Army Personnel Centre in Glasgow. On promotion to Brigadier he assumed command of the Royal School of Military Engineering, leading the £3.2 Bn RSME Public Private Partnership, in March 2009.

He has wide experience of delivering engineering projects. After managing a raft of small scale civil engineering contracts as a junior officer, he has, for the last 10 years, been increasingly involved in international post conflict reconstruction and development. Having cut his teeth on roads and power stations in the Balkans, he moved on to Southern Iraq where for a number of years he was intimately involved in the repair and management of regional utility infrastructure including water supply, irrigation, oil and gas, sewerage and transport. His Masters thesis addressed the political challenges facing the Baltic nations at the end of the Cold War. His RCDS thesis, subsequently published, dealt with the challenges of post conflict reconstruction.

A Fellow of both the Institution of Civil Engineers and of the Institution of Royal Engineers, Nick has been married to Chris for nearly 20 years. Widely travelled (which he still loves) he has a passion (but little talent) for golf, reads voraciously, shoots very badly a couple of times a year, and spends much of his limited spare time acting as deputy assistant under-groom to his wife’s horses, or walking his increasingly spoiled and disobedient spaniel.

Nick Baveystock was on the panel at Debating the State of the Nation on 1st July 2014