Sally Aldridge, BACP Head of Regulatory Policy. Therapy Today

In this month's BACP magazine "Therapy Today" Sally Aldridge writes:

"The decision to regulate counselors and psychotherapists through the HPC is a government one as laid out in the White Paper Trust, Assurance and Safety. "

She goes on to say that although other professional organisations have disputed whether the HPC is an appropriate regulator, the BACP is going along with it because the government has signalled its clear intention to go ahead with the process.

When the HPC first arrived on the scene it launched an advertising campaign which was insulting and not a little sinister. It depicted a variety of health professions (all of them were white, interestingly) each of whom looked like a bad joke, wearing a ridiculous mask. The strap lines were all about the way that people pretend to be other than what they are. The implication was clear enough: a lot of professionals lie. (Four of these adverts have been framed as large pictures and are displayed in the corridor at the HPC; I have commented on them in detail in 19th November blog "Struck Off".)

In the minutes of the Professional Liaison Group for Counselling and Psychotherapy at the HPC there is frequent mention of something called statutory regulation. Back in the late 1990s there was an attempt by Lord Alderdice to introduce statutory regulation for psychotherapy. It was his idea, his Bill, and he sought to bring it before parliament. This is an example of statutory regulation. It was thrown out.

State regulation, on the other hand, is when a government itself says that it must happen, and exerts its power on the nature and manner of that regulation.

It is pretty clear from Sally Aldridge's statement here that she believes that this current process is State Regulation: it is written in a Government's White Paper, a clear intention that the Government wants it done, she says.

Sally notes that other organisations dispute the appropriateness of the proposed regulation. I suppose she is aware that this country has a tradition of democracy, and that even if Government states its intention, it is not necessary (nor the custom) for the population to roll over and help them to carry it out, especially if it thinks this will create more problems than it hopes to solve. Good democratic systems rely on the thoughtful actions of its people.

What is at stake here is straightforward talking. You cannot both say that this is statutory regulation and that it has to be done because the Government insists. This recalls the phrase in the first PLG meeting when the Chair said 'if we don't do it to ourselves, the government will do it to us'. It is worth asking how the Government is forcing the BACP to do it to themselves - there is speculation about the benefits to be gained by the structures of institutional power, and a different set of questions related to who will be suffering from the consequences of such a manoeuvre. What is chilling is the lack of proper consideration to the different voices in this 'debate', and the way that those who may wield institutional power don't hesitate to use all kinds of blunt political manoeuvring to throw other people's arguments into bad light.

Surely if people think that something is wrong, and that there is a strong possibility that damage will ensue, then those people have a duty to stand up and say 'hang on a minute', even if they find it difficult simply to say NO.

At the end of Sally's statement she says that "Much of the opposition to statutory regulation [sic] in the HPC in letters to Therapy Today focuses on the nature of the process with terms such as ‘bureaucratic and statistically managed’, ‘cultures of surveillance’, ‘the stress of monitoring and assessment’, ‘role bound rather than ethical’."

She notices that there is a consistency in the concern voiced by people in relation to the proposed State Regulation. She goes on, however, to make the following interesting statement: "the HPC requirements of registration ... do not differ greatly from those of BACP"

This raises a series of questions the most obvious of which is, if the HPC system is not much different from the BACP then how will it improve things, exactly?

But I don't want to get side tracked. The main point is this: saying that the HPC is almost the same as the BACP is a slippery rhetorical device. The HPC is not the same as the BACP, it is different in quite specific and deliberate ways. At this point someone might call for "Evidence?", and ask what frame of reference she is using.

What a lot of people are saying is that the basis of truth is slipping away, and politics and bureaucracy are creeping into its place. The usual conventions of knowledge and debate that allow one to know more or less what someone is saying have receded from the scene, and more and more we are faced with blunt wielding of power through banal and empty phrases. This is not something many of us are used to in this country. If we haven't found neat ways of conveying this to the satisfaction of Sally Aldridge, well sorry; if we sound alarmed, well we are right to be. When truth is under attack all speech and writing becomes subject to question. This is why those in positions of authority, ie those in bureaucratic systems of power, have even more of a responsibility to speak sensibly, carefully, and as far as they are able, truthfully. If they find that the subject is beyond their comprehension, they should pause and think, and get some good advice. If you were the Head of Regulatory Policy, this responsibility would fall on you.