Important News

17th February 2011

Dear All,

The government has now halted the project to regulate the talking therapies via HPC. In its command paper published yesterday ‘Enabling Excellence’, it makes clear that statutory regulation will not apply to any new fields (except herbal medicine, following EU law). The CHRE will aim to kitemark existing registers, such as UKCP, yet without the direct and intrusive framework of HPC. Practitioners will be able to use the title they choose, and registration with a CHRE-approved list will not be obligatory.

This is the result we hoped for in the campaign, and the government seems to have responded to many of our arguments. We are very pleased with this development, and with the dialogue with politicians that has been possible. We should remember that the detail of CHRE kitemarking is not yet known, although preliminary talks with them seem have been positive. Reading between the lines, the government message seems to be that basically practitioners should sort out their own system, and if this fails, they may introduce statutory regulation at some point in the future. So, there is still a lot to be done, but we have achieved a substantial victory.

Thanks once again to everyone who has participated in and supported the campaign.