an appeal to the HPC Council

Response to HPC ‘Conclusions on the Proposed Statutory Regulation
of Psychotherapists and Counsellors’, December 2009.

From

Association for Group and Individual Psychotherapy
Association of Independent Psychotherapists
Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research
The College of Psychoanalysts-UK
The Guild of Psychotherapists
The Philadelphia Association

We are writing to respond to the Council Paper regarding the proposed statutory regulation of psychotherapists and counsellors. This draft paper indicates both the failure of HPC to carry out the requirements set out in the Government's 2007 White Paper, ‘Trust, Assurance and Safety’ as well as a failure to reach broad agreement on the crucial regulatory ‘building blocks’: professional titles to be protected, standards of proficiency, and standards of education and training. It is rather surreal that this draft set of recommendations is thus based on a lack of agreement around the fundamental issues, as if the process must continue despite its lack of rigorous foundations.

As the Council Paper reminds us, the 2007 White Paper stated that ‘... psychotherapists and counsellors will be regulated by the Health Professions Council following that Council’s rigorous process of assessing their regulatory needs and ensuring its system is capable of accommodating them’. HPC to date has acted as if there is no question of having to assess the ‘regulatory needs of the field’ or whether its system is indeed suited to accommodate them. These important and necessary tasks have not been carried out. The Council Paper states that there was an agreement of the HPC Council on 13 December 2007 to consider the questions of whether the HPC’s regulatory building blocks could be used to meet the regulation of the field and whether this could be done within the existing regulatory structure, yet a few lines later we read that for HPC, ‘the task undertaken was limited to the practicalities of implementing [the government’s] policy' re regulation of psychotherapists and counsellors. In other words, the question of regulatory needs and of the HPC’s suitability as regulator have not been addressed. As the Council no doubt knows, a legal challenge has now begun which focuses on this failure of HPC to carry out the task set out in the White Paper in a rational and responsible way.

The Paper contains further significant contradictions and omissions. The section on 'Methodology' on page 3 states that the Council invited relevant stakeholders to contribute via a 'Call for Ideas'. A Professional Liaison Group was set up to ‘explore the building blocks of regulation and its discussion was informed by the responses received to the Call for Ideas’. This description is incorrect and distorts the actual process. The central arguments against the suitability of HPC as regulator were made repeatedly to HPC during the course of 2008 yet the PLG consistently failed to enter into any serious or sustained discussion of these objections. This fact is well known in the field and has been documented systematically.

The Council Paper then tells us that ‘a stakeholder event attended by around 50 people was also held in Manchester in March 2009 to further discuss the potential future regulation of psychotherapists and counsellors’. In fact, at the meeting the initial presentations simply set out road maps for HPC regulation as if this were a given and the presentations specifically avoided any discussion of the questions of regulatory needs and of whether the HPC was the appropriate regulator. Numerous participants objected and during the course of the day stakeholders were able to shift the discussions to the basic issues of the rationality of the proposed regulation under HPC. However, these debates failed to have any effect on the subsequent PLG consultation, and indeed, when a further event was organised by stakeholders in Manchester to continue the discussion, HPC declined to attend. Objections and critiques from stakeholder groups have been documented by HPC in a cosmetic fashion, just to suggest that the voices from the field have been ‘listened to’. However, there has been no sustained, serious discussion within the PLG of the central issues at stake.

This effort to foreclose rational debate on the key issues is reflected in the accompanying document ‘Psychotherapists and Counsellors – Consultation Responses’. Most of the basic points about the principle of HPC regulation here are simply relegated to the final section of the report ‘Further Comments’ as if they were contingent details which did not have a bearing on the central questions. We have to wait until page 54 under 12.1.15 to read that ‘Some respondents questioned the purpose, validity and integrity of the consultation process. In particular, some said that the HPC had failed to consult on its suitability as a regulator of this field, or the relative suitability of other organisations or regulatory approaches’. They said that the HPC had failed to demonstrate the appropriateness of its system’. Stakeholder groups have repeatedly pointed out these are the central questions, and that they merit proper and serious consideration.

In the next section of the Council Paper 'Representative Organisations’, there is an acknowledgment that ‘the psychotherapy and counselling field does not appear to have a single or unified “professional voice”’. In fact, this is because the field is not unified in any sense and is not based on a single or unified body of knowledge or set of practices. Regulation under HPC requires that any field to be regulated display a homogeneity in its knowledge base and set of practices, yet this is not the case for the field of the talking therapies. This fact has been repeatedly pointed out to HPC yet its consequences have not been taken seriously.

Although there are many different perspectives on the question of regulation currently in the field, HPC continues to misrepresent the debate by suggesting that all those individuals and organisations who oppose HPC regulation are opposed to statutory regulation as such. Yet they know very well that no one really questions the principle of statutory regulation: it is just the question of who should be the regulator. This fact was made clear at the November 2nd meeting held at Westminster convened by Anne Milton MP, at which Marc Seale perpetuated this spin and was corrected in the discussion by the MP and by stakeholder groups.

There is also the question of the involvement of service users in the consultation process. HPC documents have repeatedly referred to the involvement of service users, yet in fact this has meant the involvement of advocacy groups claiming to represent the interests of users. In fact, the user groups which have specifically asked HPC to be represented on the PLG were denied representation. There has thus been a wholesale exclusion of real user groups. The HPC has instead chosen the advocacy groups it knows will support its own recommendations. There are two further questions here. Firstly, it is well known that one of the largest client groups of psychotherapists are psychotherapists. Psychotherapists are thus service users. Indeed at the November 2nd meeting at Westminster, the ‘service user’ that MIND brought with them was in fact a qualified psychotherapist. The second question here regards the political manipulation of service users. Those in therapy may be in favour of statutory regulation yet to suggest this must mean HPC regulation without making all the other models of statutory regulation available to service users for their consideration is surely an abusive process which is using the voices of ‘service users’ for political ends.

If we turn now to the question of 'building blocks', identified by HPC as central to its whole consultation process, there has been no agreement concerning the differentiation between psychotherapists and counsellors; there has been no agreement regarding the question of the draft standards of proficiency; and there has been no agreement re the question of standards of education and training. The proposals put forward so far by HPC have been deemed inadequate and confused, yet given this disarray the Council Paper proceeds as if the HPC’s recommendations should simply be accepted, with the absurd proviso that most of these recommendations have in fact yet to be made. The paper 'Conclusions on the Proposed Statutory Regulation of Psychotherapists and Counsellors' actually concludes with the statement on page 12 that ‘no conclusion’ can be drawn regarding education and training and standards of proficiency.

It is surely time for the HPC Council to recognise the complexity of the field it is dealing with and to have the honesty and courage to reassess the HPC’s suitability as regulator in the interests of both public protection and the protection of the ethics and vitality of the field of the talking therapies.