Regulating counselling and psychotherapy via HPC

At yesterday's PLG meeting at the HPC a very frosty silence opened up the day. Soon there were red faces and blustering interventions, and it seemed clear that something had happened outside the meeting. Suspicion and resentment bubbled up as it became more open that the 'big boys' had been cutting deals and manoeuvring for position to get the best deal in this power-sharing mess.

This group of practitioners - Counsellors and Psychotherapists - did not approach the HPC and ask to be regulated. The field has not organised itself into a centralised unified body that could be readily transferred across. So the HPC is going to have to force it to fit, with a force powered by an act in Parliament.

Professor Jeff Lucas ('lay member' of the HPC Council, and University VC many of whose graduates will end up on the HPC register), had showed himself capable of breaking through the 'group atmosphere' in January's meeting to point out the inconvenient truth that this field will involve taking on something like 40 different registers rather than the usual One. In yesterday's meeting he managed to say that this so-called field of counselling and psychotherapy was a mess and that it would be impossible for the HPC to regulate it.

Yes. The only possible outcome of forcing this impossible profession to fit is to destroy it and invent something new. Only then will you get a government sanctioned efficient programme of orderly, obedient, therapists.