LIF. The Lighting Industry Federation

LIF held its Annual Lunch Event, combined with its formal AGM on May 25th at Draper's Hall.

This is a key event for Members in the LIF year and was extremely well supported with 140 people attending the lunch and 40 attending the morning workshop, so there was plenty of networking opportunities.

The highlights of the day were:

A morning workshop entitled "Current trends in the commercial property market". There were three excellent presentations, from Land Securities, PLDA and the Carbon Trust respectively plus questions from the delegates during the open forum session.

The AGM dealt with the formal approval of LIF's accounts for the previous year, and the membership of LIF Council and it's officers for 2010/11 were confirmed (full details of which will be provided in a separate website item).

The lunch event itself had a busy schedule including: The presentation of the Holophane David Currie Award for best student of the year for the LIF Advanced Certificate Course, with three excellent finalists. The overall winner was David Wong of F.W. Thorpe plc. 

After 14 years of leadership, Lou Bedocs advised that he was stepping down as Chairman of the LIF Technical Board with effect from the 25th May and as you can imagine the occasion was duly celebrated during the lunch with a presentation to Lou in appreciation of his great contribution to LIF during that time.

The keynote speaker this year was David Kennedy, Chief Executive of the Committee on Climate Change, who are the regulators for Carbon efficiency in the UK, charged with monitoring the Government's performance in meeting the UK's targets for carbon reduction over the coming years.

 There was a raffle on behalf of the electrical and electronics industries Benevolent Association (EEIBA), organised by their Chief Executive Timothy Lambert, which raised £1200, so thank you to everyone for supporting that very worthwhile cause 

Finally the outgoing President, Peter Denny of Dextra Group, gave a review of the progress and achievements in LIF over the previous year and concluded by installing the incoming President for 2010/11, Mike Collett of Wila Lighting, who in turn installed Rune Marki of Osram as the Vice-President for 2010/11. The details of the Presidents review will be included in the fuller LIF Report for 2009/10, which will be published on the LIF website in the near future.