The chartered status is a Royal Charter from the Privy Council and if its granted it will be maintained and managed by the Association for Project Management.
There’s more information on the website about the current status and your questions at this stage go unanswered because we don’t know the detail yet:
http://www.apm.org.uk/news/chartered

One thing I won’t expect from APM or any PM certification body will be a correlated improvement in project success rates. I argue much of the project success we see today is due to the maturation of project management practices and the heroics of PMs. I believe the key to improving project success rates will be in enterprise advances in Project and Portfolio Management (PPM). It is Enterprise inability and inadequacy in regard to these investment decision-making processes that dooms many projects before they begin. All the PM certifications under the sun won’t overcome the epidemic of poor PPM practices.

Steve Romero, IT Governance Evangelist
http://community.ca.com/blogs/theitgovernanceevangelist/

My own experience from talking to many PPM Practitioners suggest that there is a groundswell that supports the emergence of PPM Professionals and a desire for the associated recognition in the wider business community that this should bring.

My personal concern is that this needs to be an inclusive process that takes into account the wishes of the wider group of stakeholders ie. Employers, Industry Bodies and most importantly the Practitioners themselves. If the process is not inclusive it will become an “exclusive club” that has no real impact on the profession as it will not be accepted, nor recognised by the vast majority of the identified stakeholders.

If we were to reference the BCS Professionalism Model it would be interesting to see where the PPM community is currently positioned. Taking the developing levels they identified; Organised, Qualified and Governed, I would suggest that we are not yet in a state that could be honestly qualified as Organised?

I say this as I believe that the lack of awareness in the “community” and the lack of cohesion between the interested bodies suggest that there are still many turf wars to be fought and won before we can move forward under a single inclusive banner.

Personally I believe the desire to create a professional body for PPM Practitioners is to be applauded and is surely the future. Such initiatives though, must surely be agnostic of any individual groups agenda / historical investment if it is to be inclusive, recognised and meaningful to the wider PPM community and its customers.

I find it quite ironic that for very different reasons, PMI and I find ourselves on the same side of the fence on this matter.

I was asked and have submitted, my PhD dissertation “Is project management a profession? And if not, what is it?” on an “amicus curiae” basis AGAINST recognizing project management as a profession.

Why? Because we have yet to mature to the point where we deserve to be recognized as a profession. Not there yet.

BR,
Dr. PDG, Jakarta
http://www.getpmcertified.com