I am delighted to be the Guest Editor as I start my year as President of CIBSE. I have been part of Lift Industry News since the beginning and enjoy reading the varied articles; we are continuously learning in the world of VT.

As I said in my Presidential address, competence is the foundation of engineering practice and I was interested to read Gary Butler’s Point of View on how safe is your lift in the event of a fire on page 12, a subject very dear to my heart. Standards form a huge part of safety and Jamie Colquhoun’s article on page 16 when he says, “We need engineers to be asking, “What safety outcomes is this project trying to achieve?” rather than, “How literally can I interpret this sentence?” had me nodding my head. Again, in my address, I commented that there is a simple truth at the heart of engineering: we are problem solvers.