IPN women's delegation to Marc Seale, CE, HPC

This letter is brought to my attention:

Marc Seale
Chief Executive and Registrar
Health Professions Council

8 February 2009

An Open Letter to Marc Seale:
First of all we really appreciate your taking the time to meet with us on 27th January and would like to thank you for that. We should say though that we were rather surprised to also meet with Diane Waller, as that had not been part of our agreement. However, the meeting was instructive as it helped to clarify our thoughts and feelings about statutory regulation, although probably not quite in the way you intended.

As you may remember, your invitation came about as a result of your meeting with Denis Postle, when you said you would like to meet with other members of the Independent Practitioners Net-work. We trusted therefore you would be interested in our views on the proposed statutory regula-tion of the psychological therapies. Perhaps naively we assumed that you would first want to hear our reasons for not welcoming this proposal and then, having listened to us, counter our arguments point by point. This might have allowed for an interesting debate, but sadly this was not what hap-pened.

You did agree with our suggestion that we could perhaps all take a few minutes to expand on who we were, what had brought us to the table, what we would like from the meeting and perhaps even what we felt passionate about. After that, however, instead of listening to our views, in which you ap-peared to have no interest, you did your best to dominate the meeting with your views. You then said ‘I don’t understand your argument!’, which surprised us, as we had not had a chance to inform you of what our argument might be! It was hard for us to break into your or Diane’s monologues and when we tried, we ended up feeling talked over. At the end of the meeting you did not ask what it had been like for us, but told us that it had been ‘useful’. Really? We left your office feeling disap-pointed and very frustrated with a clear sense that you really did not want to hear anything that might be anti regulation.

You left us with only one hope: that if not enough counsellors and psychotherapists wish to find a safe home ‘under your tent’, then, by your own admission, being regulated by the HPC would not work. If we may be so bold as to make that assumption, where would you and everyone else go from there?

To conclude, did you happen to see the article in the education section of the Guardian of 27th
January, 2009, the date of our meeting, regarding Universities and red tape entitled “Regulation, regulation, regulation”? Steven Egan, HEFCE’s deputy chief executive is quoted as saying:

“…Our sector is still over-regulated proportionate to the risks that arise from it. As a general proposition, the country will gain more value from us if we devote our resources to doing rather than measuring?”

Could this not also apply to the psychological therapies?

Yours Sincerely,


Irene Galant, Barbara Hacking, Jenny Nicholson, Els van Ooijen