PLG: structure of the register, protection of title

Tomorrow is the second time the PLG for counselling and psychotherapy meet. They have two days scheduled to discuss the 'structure of the register' and to figure out which titles shall be protected.

I shall be there in the 'public gallery' to observe this meeting. As part of my preparation I have been trying to get to know the members of the group, that is, to understand their position and aim in more detail.

To this end I have been looking at a powerpoint presentation given by the Director of Regulatory Policy for the BACP (dated 15 January 2009). This presentation repeats the mistake of the HPC minutes in calling this process statutory regulation. This process is in fact state regulation - as the chair of the PLG said at the last meeting (4 December), and I quote, "if we don't do it to ourselves, the government will do it to us".

The presentation appears to be a wonderful example of how the holistic planner thinks (see Popper's Nightmare - video clip in the sidebar). Of course, I don't know what was said on the day, and the speaker may well have been ironising the process and she went. But the slides are a sustained witness to the attempt of the holistic planner to create a cohesive picture with no cracks in it and make it easier for centralised power holders to make and impose their decisions. But as Karl Popper has forewarned us, it is only easy in theory, and will lead to a nightmare in practice.

The slides show four interlocking pieces of a jigsaw puzzle: State Regulation, HPC, Skills for Health, and IAPT. NICE appears as a bullet point under the heading of IAPT and reminds me how difficult it is to conceptualise reality in this way. The whole country is reduced to four government initiatives, no wonder we're all anxious and depressed.


"The holistic planner overlooks the fact that it is easy to centralise all power, but impossible to centralise all knowledge which is distributed over many individual minds, and whose centralisation would be necessary for the wise wielding of centralised power ... Unable to ascertain what is in the minds of many individuals, he must try to control and stereotype interests and beliefs by education and propaganda, but this attempt to control minds must destroy the last possibility of finding out what people really think. For it is clearly incompatible with the free expression of thought, especially of critical thought, and ultimately it must destroy knowledge. The greater the gain in power, the greater the loss of knowledge." quoted in the Editorial, Times Higher Ed Supp, 8 June 1984(!)