With the Professional Liaison Group (PLG) only two meetings away from completing its work which could see legislation for the regulation of counsellors and psychotherapists through the Health Professions Council (HPC) drawn up before a general election next year, a cross-modality alliance has sprung into action and is fighting these proposals. In their view the Government has created a four-pronged drive – Skills for Health, NICE, IAPT and HPC – to conform counselling and psychotherapy to what it wants. These developments are seen by those protesting as likely to reduce access to long-term, relationally oriented therapy, to reduce client choice, to medicalise the field, to rigidify training and inflate its cost and hence the cost of therapy. Members of the Alliance for Counselling and Psychotherapy believe that counselling and psychotherapy are not healthcare professions and that as such the HPC is an inappropriate regulator; only one third of therapists work within a healthcare setting and what they offer is not a branch of medicine. Everything about the HPC’s medical values and the homogenous field it will seek to create, say the Alliance, is antithetical to the rich diversity and values of counselling and psychotherapy. BACP, for whom the HPC was not the regulator of choice, worked hard to get the Government to accept a stand alone council – the Psychological Professions Council – but now supports the HPC process and has confidence in its ability to evolve as it expands to take in a non-medical range of professions. Sally Aldridge, Director of Regulatory Policy, who is closely involved in thrashing out the best deal for practitioners through the PLG, sets out a robust response to the views of the Alliance.  There are powerful arguments on both sides of the debate: for Jonathan Coe of Witness it is ethically imperative to support HPC registration in order to protect the client, while Brian Thorne finds that out of a concern for clients and the wellbeing of the wider society, it is ethically imperative for him to oppose it. We are happy for Therapy Today to be a forum for this debate and urge you to read the contributions and make up your own mind.