5 April 2024
UKCP's recent withdrawal from the MoU2 on conversion therapy

On the eve of the 25th Anniversary celebration of Pink Therapy (the UK’s first and largest organisation created to help LGBTQIA+ clients and therapists to have a better experience in the counselling world), the current UKCP leadership has announced its withdrawal as a signatory of the current version of the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy (MoU2) (and from being a member of the coalition).

The withdrawal apparently comes about because the MoU2 includes conversion therapy against children, and the current UKCP board would appear to disagree with this stance. This is despite the UKCP being part of a coalition of professionals that is fully aware that conversion therapy impacts young LGBTQIA+ people. There is no evidence that suggests that conversion therapy works (and indeed, UKCP’s own website still states that they expect practitioners not to engage with conversion therapy) and extensive evidence exists that it is harmful.

We remain unclear about why including children (some of our most vulnerable potential clients) in a ban on conversion therapy is perceived as a negative. Statistics concerning homeless people show a significant over-representation of LGBTQIA+ people, including homeless youth. These statistics, considering the existence of the LGBTQIA+ child, suggest that children and young people are at significant risk of being forced into some kind of conversion therapy (or risk losing their home). The current UKCP leadership suggests that it does not disagree with the notion that ‘conversion therapy is bad’, but with the idea that ‘children’ and ‘young people’ should be included in the ban. We hold that if conversion therapy is bad (and we know from evidence that it is), then the age of the person does not actually matter. Conversion therapy kills. That does not change when someone reaches 18.

UKCP’s statement suggests that their concerns have not been listened to on “a number of occasions”, however, the fact that they voluntarily signed the MoU version 2 several years after they mention these concerns suggests that this is in fact a position change by UKCP, rather than an ongoing issue, where the wording for the MoU2 would have been robustly discussed as part of coalition membership.

Not only does this move potentially leave LGBTQIA+ clients undefended but also leaves the many queer and cisgender straight therapists who are UKCP members, and queer and cisgender straight trainees on UKCP-accredited courses feeling blindsided, betrayed and demoralised that a membership organisation they have either chosen to join, or are required to join as part of their training or job commitments, and no longer represents them safely. The UKCP has happily taken members’ membership fees and then made a unilateral decision not in the best interests of the membership, the profession, or clients, and indeed has done so entirely without consultation with its paying members. Who then does the UKCP represent?

UKCP’s current Board of trustees have made this unilateral decision, with no discussion or consultation with the UKCP membership as a whole, many of whom find themselves disgusted by an apparent ‘knee-jerk’ response, with no parallel documentation in place to apparently achieve the same aim (the withdrawal letter states their own policy on conversion therapy will be created). This comes after the UKCP repeatedly refused to respond to invitations for dialogue about serious concerns raised by multiple UKCP members, Members’ Forum Representatives as well as over a thousand signatories of Therapists Against Conversion Therapy and Transphobia (TACTT)’s open letter (last updated in January 2024). This letter was initiated as a result of the UKCP’s recent position concerning the promotion of so-called 'exploratory therapy' for so called 'gender-critical' therapists, again without any consultation of its UKCP members or concerned therapists and clients.

This latest decision made by the current UKCP leadership seeks to undermine the efforts of a broad-based coalition of professional organisations, respectfully working together for a number of years to achieve the agreed goal of ending conversion therapy. Undermining several years’ work and broad-based professional opinion that conversion therapy is harmful seems to be a retrograde step. Given the current climate of discrimination which has led to a record rise in violence against LGBTQIA+ people, this action of withdrawal from the MoU2 is an act of hostility which would not be supported by the UKCP membership, clients, or other stakeholders who are LGBTQIA+ or allies if they were consulted.

We suggest that the UKCP has acted against its own code of ethics (point 32) in making this decision. We firstly call upon UKCP’s board to reverse this decision made on behalf of its membership and other stakeholders without consent or any form of referendum, to establish members’ agreement with such action, with immediate effect.

Secondly we call on UKCP members to join us in calling for a vote of no confidence in the UKCP board, and in calling for their removal from office by a removal election. This letter serves as the petition calling for this, which needs to be signed by 2% of the membership (approximately 250 UKCP members, based on UKCP’s current listed membership statistics).

Join us in letting UKCP know that conversion practices for any age of client are not acceptable, and the most ethical way to ensure that clients are safely held in this regard is by adherence to the membership code, supported by UKCP being an MoU2 signatory.

We the undersigned, agree with the text above.

If you are a UKCP current member, please state this next to your name.

Update 05 April 2024

UPDATE

Please make sure you state you are a UKCP member in the ‘affiliation’ or ‘name’ section!

Update 06 April 2024

Resources for taking further action

You can visit our blog to get further ideas for taking action here: therapistsagainsttransphobia.org/2024/04/06/how-to...

Update 09 April 2024

PLEASE verify your email

We’ve become aware that a small number of people aren’t getting verification emails. If you don’t get an email straight away, please would you try with a different address?

Update 09 April 2024

Please verify your email

We’ve become aware that a small number of people aren’t getting verification emails. If you don’t get an email straight away, please would you try with a different address?

Update 19 June 2024

Responses to the UKCP meeting

An update for signers of this letter:

UKCP – The Board Removal Vote.

As many of you know, The UKCP Board held an online meeting Monday to put its case to members on how to vote in its forthcoming removal election. Over 300 UKCP members are reported to have joined this meeting.

We are listing here the headlines, as we understood them, and below this (in the longer version), quotations from the meeting and links to relevant documents.

As the vote begins we remain extremely concerned about the actions of the UKCP Board and we do not believe that their actions in withdrawing from the MoU have been adequately explained. We believe that some very serious questions remain, and in the absence of receiving answers, despite trying for months, our UKCP cohort continues to call for the removal of the Board and their subsequent replacement with a new team which will restore the UKCP to the MoU (as the current Board restated that it would not do), unless a full and transparent consultative process involving members of all kinds indicates a different course of action.

The headlines from the meeting are:

  1. The UKCP Board states that their figure for triggering the vote is 2% and that that’s low by comparison with other organisations. They stated that the petition achieved this level, just, and inferred that if a higher number had been required, it wouldn’t have been reached. We’d like to respond that TACTT’s open letter stopped being promoted at the point we reached the number of signatures required and a decision was made to submit to UKCP. TACTT is confident that it could have added more signatures, perhaps significantly more, had it continued to seek them.

  2. The UKCP Board states that NCPS supports them in the aim of creating a new, alternative version of the MoU. NCPS has categorically denied this and has now asked UKCP to stop saying it’s true. 
    
  3. The UKCP Board states they had no choice but to withdraw at speed from the MoU and although they knew that this may be seen as a transphobic action, they a) didn’t have time to mitigate the process around this, and b) although they knew it could be perceived as transphobic, they didn’t consider how their action would impact members. They also feel that they are “ethically sensitive” and the right people to remain on the board. However, the Board has also said it discussed this in advance of making the decision with colleagues and some of the member colleges. Which is it? That there was time to engage with several colleges and colleagues, or that this had to be done so fast that there wasn’t time to consider the impact the decision would have?
    

WHY did the decision have to be so fast? Can the UKCP categorically state that they have signed no legal settlement that has compelled them to withdraw from the MoU?

  1. The UKCP Board’s original stated reason for withdrawal was about ‘children’. At the meeting the main message seemed to be about ‘insurance premiums’. The Board now states that it had to withdraw the UKCP because of insurance policy premiums (and that their responsibility is to UKCP, with no mention of clients or their members). With respect to stated concerns about the care of children, the UKCP board has claimed that the MoU Secretariat refused to engage on this. There is nothing in the minutes of any UKCP trustee meeting from the last 18 months that suggests this and it has been stated in the meeting on June 17th by an attendee (presumably on the secretariat) via the Q&A panel that the minutes of the MoU meetings do not support this. Whichever way, the MoU was a guideline, rather than a legal document.
    
  2. The UKCP Board has repeatedly said that they want to hear from LGBTQ+ (and other) voices. TACTT has been trying to engage with UKCP on this matter since November 2023, with no results whatsoever. The UKCP Board also states that it supports the Cass review, which has been widely criticised since its publication, not least by trans people whose voices were systematically excluded from it.

  3. The UKCP Board stated that the removal of the trustees would destabilise the organisation and that many new developments would have to be ‘put on ice’, yet also claiming that the current Board is new. Irrespective of this seemingly contradictory rhetoric, it must be pointed out that the Board wouldn’t be replaced until new members of a trustee board (also potentially members with experience of being trustees) were in place.

In short: the narrative we have heard seems to be as follows.

They couldn’t tell members the truth, but they’ve also been transparent from the start.

They are against conversion therapy, but they support the Cass Review. This has been widely discredited by leading academics, and was created and managed by a government that explicitly and energetically attempted to destroy the rights of trans people in the UK. This government has refused to bring forward a ban of Conversion Therapy (the Minister who commissioned it celebrated the release of the final Cass report with excited claims of the defeat of the “militant gender lobby”) and the Cass report has been weaponised extensively within the political and media discourse since its release.

They believe in ‘healthy exploratory therapy’ but will not commit to a starting point of stating that trans identities are valid and are as legitimate as cisgender identities. Without this, so-called ‘exploratory therapy’ effectively becomes conversion therapy.

They want to create a new regulatory version of the MoU, but again, will not commit to the standpoint of the original MoU. They didn’t know that the MoU covered children (we ask, why would it not, and why did it take 8 years and having signed the document twice to bring this question - which could have been answered easily and quickly at any stage?) and state that children have age-specific needs. Our response to this? Of course they do, but why does this mean that a well-practised approach of supporting a child to explore their identity - trans, cisgender or anything else - is invalid?. And we point out again that the MoU does not state any particular way of working for either adults or children and young people.

Long version

1: In the interests of expediency, TACTT sent the list of signatures when we knew we had reached the number required. If the number had been higher, we would have continued to share the letter until the higher number was reached.

2: UKCP have withdrawn from the MoU2 and intend to create a regulatory document around conversion therapy. UKCP (Jon Levett, CEO) said in the meeting “We've got together a working group which is going to start to meet on a monthly basis to really start to get some momentum on this. So NCPS are very definitely involved, very definitely signed up to this.” Another trustee states “ [we have] form[ed] a working group led by our CEO John Levitt already we're collaborating with a number of organisations including the British Psychoanalytic Council, the National Counselling and Psychotherapy Society and a number of others”

NCPS’s response is “Just to reassure you, the NCPS has re-joined, and is fully supportive of, the MOU as the right mechanism to ban conversion therapy, a ban which has been our consistent policy. We are not looking to create an alternative MOU […] I have raised this with UKCP and asked them to refrain from sending out these statements”

3: UKCP say that they didn’t have time to consider the potential fallout. We respect that the open letter went up the same day as the announcement. However, what this tells us is that the board just did not consider this, in advance of releasing such a huge statement. They also say in the same meeting that they DID consider that it might be seen as transphobic, but that none of them (it seems) considered the impact that might have. One cannot have it both ways.

“We didn't have time to address the potential fallout before the petition came against us. So we have been and we are always against conversion therapy and the petition was based on incorrect information”

“To be totally transparent we considered that the withdrawal taken out of context could be experienced as transphobic and homophobic, but what we didn't consider was the potential impact.” “We believe that as the existing board that we have the skills, the vision and the ethical sensitivity to take the forward and deliver on the charity’s strategic aims”

“We did discuss it with colleagues. We did discuss with some of the colleges, although we acknowledged we didn't discuss with all of them”

4: From the MoU2: “conversion therapy’ is an umbrella term for a therapeutic approach, or any model or individual viewpoint that demonstrates an assumption that any sexual orientation or gender identity is inherently preferable to any other, and which attempts to bring about a change of sexual orientation or gender identity, or seeks to suppress an individual’s expression of sexual orientation or gender identity on that basis.” and “signatory organisations agree that the practice of conversion therapy, whether in relation to sexual orientation or gender identity, is unethical and potentially harmful.”

UKCP state concerns about children and not knowing that children were covered under ‘people’. What exactly are children, to UKCP, if not people? Jen Ayling stated: “you know, a child's need is very different to an adult's needs and I think that's where there's the need for additional guidance.” The MoU does not give guidance on HOW to work with people exploring their gender. It simply allows room for children to fully explore their identities from within a framework that believes “that neither sexual orientation nor gender identity in themselves are indicators of a mental disorder” (MoU2)

From the UKCP meeting: “Now we did an attempt to engage in dialogue but came to the point when faced with a significant increase in our insurance premium”

They suggest that “over the last few weeks we have endeavoured as a board to transparently communicate the reasoning and risk assessment process which underpinned our decision”, yet they have changed their story to being about insurance and explicitly state they couldn’t state this originally. What has legally changed that they now can?

5: From the meeting: “Any clinical guidance will be backed by robust research evidence. We're supportive of the Cass review and it will form part of our ongoing considerations when creating new regulation and clinical guidance”. Cass has been discredited in many areas and by many voices since its publication. See Transactual (transactual.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/TransActual-...) the OSF Preprint paper (https://osf.io/preprints/osf/uhndk), and Dr Ruth Pearce’s ongoing updates (ruthpearce.net/2024/04/16/whats-wrong-with-the-cas...) for just three of them.

They also state “You see what we urgently need to do is create new regulatory guidance for conversion practices that has good governance, transparency, consultation, the voice of psychotherapy and most importantly the voices of the LGBTQIA+ community”.

UKCP would not answer a question as to whether they were prepared to start any new version of an MoU from the point of view that a trans identity was as valid as a cisgender identity. They did talk about “healthy exploratory therapy”. Florence Ashley has a very useful paper on why ‘exploratory therapy’ within a framework that doesn’t accept trans (whether in adults or children) as a valid identity is conversion therapy. UKCP declined to answer to this question as well.

6: From the meeting: “The upheaval and cost implications to the charity of appointing an entirely new board would essentially make the organization non-functioning in terms of major future developments for a significant period of time. Conference planning, strategic development work and many of the other projects we've successfully launched would have to be put on ice.”

However they go on to list all the things they have achieved as a new board. Which seems to directly contradict their claims of destabilisation.

“There’s a lot done but not all of it will be directly visible to you. So we started to work preparing the relationship with colleges, which was a factor within the EGM core. We are managing legal claims. We relocated the offices. 17th June, I think was the D date. And estimated to save 150 K annually. We're improving office performance. We're guiding the NHS pathways, talking therapies pilots. We've reinstated the annual conference. We reinstated the ethics committee. And as many of you again will be aware, we've consulted on and a developing the new 3 year strategy. And I just want to say a little bit about that is that the three-year strategy and we've run 3 4 seminars on that already through 4 webinars on that already. And put up various polls just to gain attraction and interest. The Strategy Working Group is comprised of 2 chairs at the colleges and one vice chair of the colleges working with the board nominated board of trustees.”

UKCP is presenting a bundle of contradictions and obfuscations to its members. There is no real clarity and in removing themselves from the MoU they place their members in a very difficult position.

Update 19 June 2024

Follow up to the UKCP decision

As many of you know, The UKCP Board held an online meeting Monday to put its case to members on how to vote in its forthcoming removal election. Over 300 UKCP members are reported to have joined this meeting.

We are listing here the headlines, as we understood them, and below this (in the longer version), quotations from the meeting and links to relevant documents.

As the vote begins we remain extremely concerned about the actions of the UKCP Board and we do not believe that their actions in withdrawing from the MoU have been adequately explained. We believe that some very serious questions remain, and in the absence of receiving answers, despite trying for months, our UKCP cohort continues to call for the removal of the Board and their subsequent replacement with a new team which will restore the UKCP to the MoU (as the current Board restated that it would not do), unless a full and transparent consultative process involving members of all kinds indicates a different course of action.

The headlines from the meeting are:

  1. The UKCP Board states that their figure for triggering the vote is 2% and that that’s low by comparison with other organisations. They stated that the petition achieved this level, just, and inferred that if a higher number had been required, it wouldn’t have been reached. We’d like to respond that TACTT’s open letter stopped being promoted at the point we reached the number of signatures required and a decision was made to submit to UKCP. TACTT is confident that it could have added more signatures, perhaps significantly more, had it continued to seek them.

  2. The UKCP Board states that NCPS supports them in the aim of creating a new, alternative version of the MoU. NCPS has categorically denied this and has now asked UKCP to stop saying it’s true. 
    
  3. The UKCP Board states they had no choice but to withdraw at speed from the MoU and although they knew that this may be seen as a transphobic action, they a) didn’t have time to mitigate the process around this, and b) although they knew it could be perceived as transphobic, they didn’t consider how their action would impact members. They also feel that they are “ethically sensitive” and the right people to remain on the board. However, the Board has also said it discussed this in advance of making the decision with colleagues and some of the member colleges. Which is it? That there was time to engage with several colleges and colleagues, or that this had to be done so fast that there wasn’t time to consider the impact the decision would have?
    

WHY did the decision have to be so fast? Can the UKCP categorically state that they have signed no legal settlement that has compelled them to withdraw from the MoU?

  1. The UKCP Board’s original stated reason for withdrawal was about ‘children’. At the meeting the main message seemed to be about ‘insurance premiums’. The Board now states that it had to withdraw the UKCP because of insurance policy premiums (and that their responsibility is to UKCP, with no mention of clients or their members). With respect to stated concerns about the care of children, the UKCP board has claimed that the MoU Secretariat refused to engage on this. There is nothing in the minutes of any UKCP trustee meeting from the last 18 months that suggests this and it has been stated in the meeting on June 17th by an attendee (presumably on the secretariat) via the Q&A panel that the minutes of the MoU meetings do not support this. Whichever way, the MoU was a guideline, rather than a legal document.
    
  2. The UKCP Board has repeatedly said that they want to hear from LGBTQ+ (and other) voices. TACTT has been trying to engage with UKCP on this matter since November 2023, with no results whatsoever. The UKCP Board also states that it supports the Cass review, which has been widely criticised since its publication, not least by trans people whose voices were systematically excluded from it.

  3. The UKCP Board stated that the removal of the trustees would destabilise the organisation and that many new developments would have to be ‘put on ice’, yet also claiming that the current Board is new. Irrespective of this seemingly contradictory rhetoric, it must be pointed out that the Board wouldn’t be replaced until new members of a trustee board (also potentially members with experience of being trustees) were in place.

In short: the narrative we have heard seems to be as follows.

They couldn’t tell members the truth, but they’ve also been transparent from the start.

They are against conversion therapy, but they support the Cass Review. This has been widely discredited by leading academics, and was created and managed by a government that explicitly and energetically attempted to destroy the rights of trans people in the UK. This government has refused to bring forward a ban of Conversion Therapy (the Minister who commissioned it celebrated the release of the final Cass report with excited claims of the defeat of the “militant gender lobby”) and the Cass report has been weaponised extensively within the political and media discourse since its release.

They believe in ‘healthy exploratory therapy’ but will not commit to a starting point of stating that trans identities are valid and are as legitimate as cisgender identities. Without this, so-called ‘exploratory therapy’ effectively becomes conversion therapy.

They want to create a new regulatory version of the MoU, but again, will not commit to the standpoint of the original MoU. They didn’t know that the MoU covered children (we ask, why would it not, and why did it take 8 years and having signed the document twice to bring this question - which could have been answered easily and quickly at any stage?) and state that children have age-specific needs. Our response to this? Of course they do, but why does this mean that a well-practised approach of supporting a child to explore their identity - trans, cisgender or anything else - is invalid?. And we point out again that the MoU does not state any particular way of working for either adults or children and young people.

Long version

1: In the interests of expediency, TACTT sent the list of signatures when we knew we had reached the number required. If the number had been higher, we would have continued to share the letter until the higher number was reached.

2: UKCP have withdrawn from the MoU2 and intend to create a regulatory document around conversion therapy. UKCP (Jon Levett, CEO) said in the meeting “We've got together a working group which is going to start to meet on a monthly basis to really start to get some momentum on this. So NCPS are very definitely involved, very definitely signed up to this.” Another trustee states “ [we have] form[ed] a working group led by our CEO John Levitt already we're collaborating with a number of organisations including the British Psychoanalytic Council, the National Counselling and Psychotherapy Society and a number of others”

NCPS’s response is “Just to reassure you, the NCPS has re-joined, and is fully supportive of, the MOU as the right mechanism to ban conversion therapy, a ban which has been our consistent policy. We are not looking to create an alternative MOU […] I have raised this with UKCP and asked them to refrain from sending out these statements”

3: UKCP say that they didn’t have time to consider the potential fallout. We respect that the open letter went up the same day as the announcement. However, what this tells us is that the board just did not consider this, in advance of releasing such a huge statement. They also say in the same meeting that they DID consider that it might be seen as transphobic, but that none of them (it seems) considered the impact that might have. One cannot have it both ways.

“We didn't have time to address the potential fallout before the petition came against us. So we have been and we are always against conversion therapy and the petition was based on incorrect information”

“To be totally transparent we considered that the withdrawal taken out of context could be experienced as transphobic and homophobic, but what we didn't consider was the potential impact.” “We believe that as the existing board that we have the skills, the vision and the ethical sensitivity to take the forward and deliver on the charity’s strategic aims”

“We did discuss it with colleagues. We did discuss with some of the colleges, although we acknowledged we didn't discuss with all of them”

4: From the MoU2: “conversion therapy’ is an umbrella term for a therapeutic approach, or any model or individual viewpoint that demonstrates an assumption that any sexual orientation or gender identity is inherently preferable to any other, and which attempts to bring about a change of sexual orientation or gender identity, or seeks to suppress an individual’s expression of sexual orientation or gender identity on that basis.” and “signatory organisations agree that the practice of conversion therapy, whether in relation to sexual orientation or gender identity, is unethical and potentially harmful.”

UKCP state concerns about children and not knowing that children were covered under ‘people’. What exactly are children, to UKCP, if not people? Jen Ayling stated: “you know, a child's need is very different to an adult's needs and I think that's where there's the need for additional guidance.” The MoU does not give guidance on HOW to work with people exploring their gender. It simply allows room for children to fully explore their identities from within a framework that believes “that neither sexual orientation nor gender identity in themselves are indicators of a mental disorder” (MoU2)

From the UKCP meeting: “Now we did an attempt to engage in dialogue but came to the point when faced with a significant increase in our insurance premium”

They suggest that “over the last few weeks we have endeavoured as a board to transparently communicate the reasoning and risk assessment process which underpinned our decision”, yet they have changed their story to being about insurance and explicitly state they couldn’t state this originally. What has legally changed that they now can?

5: From the meeting: “Any clinical guidance will be backed by robust research evidence. We're supportive of the Cass review and it will form part of our ongoing considerations when creating new regulation and clinical guidance”. Cass has been discredited in many areas and by many voices since its publication. See Transactual (transactual.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/TransActual-...) the OSF Preprint paper (https://osf.io/preprints/osf/uhndk), and Dr Ruth Pearce’s ongoing updates (ruthpearce.net/2024/04/16/whats-wrong-with-the-cas...) for just three of them.

They also state “You see what we urgently need to do is create new regulatory guidance for conversion practices that has good governance, transparency, consultation, the voice of psychotherapy and most importantly the voices of the LGBTQIA+ community”.

UKCP would not answer a question as to whether they were prepared to start any new version of an MoU from the point of view that a trans identity was as valid as a cisgender identity. They did talk about “healthy exploratory therapy”. Florence Ashley has a very useful paper on why ‘exploratory therapy’ within a framework that doesn’t accept trans (whether in adults or children) as a valid identity is conversion therapy. UKCP declined to answer to this question as well.

6: From the meeting: “The upheaval and cost implications to the charity of appointing an entirely new board would essentially make the organization non-functioning in terms of major future developments for a significant period of time. Conference planning, strategic development work and many of the other projects we've successfully launched would have to be put on ice.”

However they go on to list all the things they have achieved as a new board. Which seems to directly contradict their claims of destabilisation.

“There’s a lot done but not all of it will be directly visible to you. So we started to work preparing the relationship with colleges, which was a factor within the EGM core. We are managing legal claims. We relocated the offices. 17th June, I think was the D date. And estimated to save 150 K annually. We're improving office performance. We're guiding the NHS pathways, talking therapies pilots. We've reinstated the annual conference. We reinstated the ethics committee. And as many of you again will be aware, we've consulted on and a developing the new 3 year strategy. And I just want to say a little bit about that is that the three-year strategy and we've run 3 4 seminars on that already through 4 webinars on that already. And put up various polls just to gain attraction and interest. The Strategy Working Group is comprised of 2 chairs at the colleges and one vice chair of the colleges working with the board nominated board of trustees.”

UKCP is presenting a bundle of contradictions and obfuscations to its members. There is no real clarity and in removing themselves from the MoU they place their members in a very difficult position.

Update 20 June 2024

communication from UKCP

UKCP have asked us to amend two of our statements.

UKCP argue that they have never said that they are seeking to replace the existing MoU and that TACTT is misrepresenting this. Our statement was based on the following comments by Jen Ayling, vice chair of UKCP, in the meeting on Monday 17th June:

"I think it's not about thinking that there's anything in the current MoU that's harmful. It's about the fact that it doesn't go far enough"

"As a board we've long been sitting not just us as a board but previous incarnations of the board with concerns about the brevity of the MoU as a document and its lack of nuance [...] and we think this call for a better regulatory guidance and best practice guidance is most urgently needed".

If we have misunderstood these statements, we apologise, but we would also request clarification of them as a matter of urgency – do UKCP seek to develop “better regulatory guidance and best practice guidance” in place of the MoU, or do these words have another meaning?

UK would also like us to communicate that NCPS “has not distanced themselves from the project, as your piece implies”. For full transparency, we share the information that NCPS has given us:

"As was stated in April, we [NCPS] have been in discussions with UKCP and other talking therapy membership bodies regarding potential practice guidelines. However, nothing has been agreed regarding ‘regulatory guidelines’ or indeed the establishment of a working group; there have simply been some discussions. I have raised this with UKCP and asked them to refrain for sending out these statements".

We hope this clarifies the matter.

1,595
signatures
1,494 verified
  1. LJ Potter, Psychotherapist and academic, Private practice, Stafford
  2. Sophie Hickson, Trainee systemic and family psychotherapist, Kings college (training), London
  3. Danny van Deurzen-Smith, Deputy Principal, NSPC, London
  4. Tristan Brooks, Psychotherapist, NCPS Senior Accredited Registrant, Bristol
  5. Sarah Favier, Systemic Family Psychotherapist, UKCP registered, Birmingham
  6. J F Evans, Psychotherapist and researcher, Private Practice, Glasgow
  7. Gail Simon, Psychotherapist, The Pink Practice, London
  8. Faye mcdonell, Family and systemic psychotherapist, Private practice & NHS, Cambridge
  9. Erin Stevens, Counsellor, Ilkley
  10. Alec Warner, Trainee Psychotherapist, Sherwood Psychotherapy Training Institute, Leicester
  11. Jenny O'Gorman, Psychotherapist, Gloucester
  12. Katie Fisher, Trainee Person Centred & Experiential Psychotherapist, Sherwood Psychotherapy Training Institute, Sheffield
  13. Diana Hurwitz, Trainee Psychotherapist, Sherwood Psychotherapy Institute, Nottingham
  14. David-John Cooke, Therapist, York
  15. Kathryn Nawrockyi, Counsellor (BACP) & trainee psychotherapist (UKCP), The Minster Centre, London
  16. Addison Raven, Psychotherapist & academic, Private practice & SPTI, Nottingham
  17. Ambika Erin Connelly UKCP member, Psychotherapist, Supervisor and Trainer, Private Practice, Derby and Trainer SPTI, Nottingham, Derby England
  18. Salvo La Rosa UKCP reg, Integrative Psychotherapist, Private Practice, London
  19. Rachael Peacock, Person-centred Psychotherapist, UKCP Member, London
  20. Anna Morelle-Grey MBACP, Psychotherapist / Counsellor, Clearview Counselling & Psychotherapy, Cardiff
...
1,454 more
verified signatures
  1. Holly Boden, Counselling & Wellbeing Coordinator, Sheffield
  2. Alexandra Michael, Psychotherapist, Enfield
  3. Gemma Latimer, UKCP Gestalt Psychotherapist, Kindling Therapy, Glasgow
  4. Paolo Plotegher, Psychoterapist, Queen Margaret University, Glasgow
  5. Elizabeth Pittock, Psychotherapist, LP Psychotherapy, Glasgow
  6. Alexander Lopez-Glynne, trainee therapist, Alex Glynne Psychotherapy, Falmouth
  7. Vanessa Lindley UKCP member, Trainee Psychotherapist, Coventry
  8. Tanja van Oudtshoorn, Psychotherapist, Private practice, London
  9. Mark Chidgey, Systemic Family Therapist, AFT, London
  10. Sarah Wood, Therapist, Private Practice, London
  11. Jon Musker, Trainee Psychotherapist, Metanoia Institute, London
  12. Pippa Bolger, Counsellor & social worker, Milton Keynes
  13. Stephanie Lockett, Psychotherapist, Private Practice, Nottinghamshire
  14. Frances Thompson UKCP student member, Trainee children's psychotherapeutic counsellor, University of Cambridge (student), Cambridge
  15. Becky Moore, psychotherapist, varied, Tamworth
  16. Rose Buxton, Psychotherapist, Sexologist, UKCP Member, Bedford
  17. Clare Carter, Counsellor, BACP, Dover
  18. Vanessa McHardy, Psychotherapist, Waikino
  19. Jude Lewis, psychotherapist, private practice, London
  20. Ushna Mian, Trainee Clinical Psychologist, Cambridgeshire & Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust
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