I have been a member of BACP for over a decade. During this time many and various issues have been raised, and I have been generally very happy with the Association’s attitudes and responses.

Over the past year or so, however, I’ve found myself feeling much less confident of BACP’s support for members’ concerns. Like, I imagine, most of my peers with busy lives, I wanted to believe that the Government’s huge financial investment in counselling would be advantageous for our profession. I wanted to believe in benign ‘parents’ (Government, BACP, etc) looking after me and my clients’ interests, for the greater good of all concerned. Sadly, the letters from those already affected by the juggernaut of IAPT control/paperwork, are threatening this comfortable delusion. The warning bells are becoming too insistent for many of us to ignore; yet BACP’s responses to concerns continue to be bland ‘government speak’ patter. The implication seems to be that anyone making a fuss is either paranoid or a bit of a dinosaur, and most probably both.

Our Government may indeed be well intentioned, but we know the way to hell is paved with these. It’s obvious that bureaucrats with a focus on ‘evidence based medicine’ are ill equipped to grasp the subtleties of the therapeutic relationship. How do you breakdown, define and feed into tick box computer language qualities such as love, care, wisdom or intuition? These things are experienced deeply in the subjective mode.

In the April issue of Therapy Today (‘Open forum responses’), a member has misgivings about her clients being given forms to fill in at every session. She gets little sympathy from BACP, who apparently are supporting this constant monitoring. The fact that the client is forced to leave the delicate world of the interpersonal and subjective, the therapeutic encounter, and go straight into the objective and analytical world of form filling and ticking boxes, in my opinion is an abuse. 

We have a government with an insatiable appetite for monitoring, targets, and control; is it unreasonable to expect our professional body to try to protect us and our clients from this endless assessment? A form at the beginning and end of therapy could surely suffice, and would be an acceptable level of intrusion, a balanced approach. Especially since we’re all aware of the detrimental effects of this constant monitoring in other professions that the Government has interfered with.

The issue of ‘vulnerable adults’, referred to in the same article, is another example of why I feel we have good reason to worry. Who can argue with a noble intention such as ‘protecting vulnerable adults’? But, unfortunately, we know that the flipside of this is that government then has an excuse to decide who is, and who is not, fit to practise. Do we really want our valuable work with clients to be defined and legislated for by civil servants; people in no way equipped to understand what counselling truly entails? They may consult with BACP and others, but judging by what’s happened so far, they seem to end up imposing their model on us and nobody’s putting up much of a fight. 

It would be naïve of us not to accept that all governments want control, it’s in their nature, and we need to be alert to this.

I should like to finish by adding my voice to those requesting an online referendum. Perhaps then we can see clearly what the majority really think and feel on this topic. BACP is championing the values of monitoring, feedback and transparency. Surely it would wish to ascertain whether the position that it is taking, in regard to Improving Access to Psychological Therapies, is the one that its membership actually wants it to take?