Welcome to the Partners for Counselling and Psychotherapy Website.

We are a partnership of fourteen organisations* from across the counselling and psychotherapy profession with a shared purpose: To hold open a space to protect counselling and psychotherapy from restrictive standardisation and homogenisation, supporting the wide range of good practice in the field.

We have a shared determination to support and protect diversity in the field and since our inception earlier this year, we have realised the remarkable achievement of developing a broad front of diverse and experienced organisations, with a combined membership of over 19,000. There are campaign groups, think tanks, membership bodies and professional organisations among our number.

PCP is best described as a common platform, working together on our shared aims, motivated by our members’ dissatisfaction at the BACP, UKCP and BPC’s increasing distance from the many and growing concerns of ordinary counsellors and psychotherapists. We do not privilege the aims of any individual group.

Our current work is focused on two areas:

  1. The SCoPEd project, which has been developed without proper consultation, is currently based on questionable evidence, and fails to properly reflect or direct the profession. [Click here to read more about SCoPEd]
  2. The plans for a Counselling and Psychotherapy APPG. When the UKCP and BACP announced their intention to create an All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG), they were told by a member of the House of Lords that not only do they not have the power to do so, but that they had misunderstood the process. It is our belief that only an inclusive APPG, which welcomes diverse perspectives and is willing to engage with the profession as a whole, can properly serve the interests of clients and therapists.

We currently await the second iteration of SCoPEd, as well as further information regarding the APPG. We are keeping a watching brief on the situation, and will provide updates about our response to any developments as they occur.

We have requested meetings with BACP, UKCP and BPC on a number of occasions, and these have been declined. Indeed, our latest letter has not been responded to at all.
Our invitation remains open for these three professional bodies to meet with us and open their discussions, in order to cultivate a future for counselling and psychotherapy that works for counsellors, psychotherapists, clients and society.

*Our fifteen organisations are: Alliance for Counselling and Psychotherapy; Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility; Psychotherapy and Counselling Union; Counsellors Together UK; The Person Centred Association; The College of Psychoanalysts; UK Person Centred Experiential; Surviving Work; A Disorder for Everyone; Free Psychotherapy Network; The Black, African and Asian Therapy Network; Pink Therapy; Aashna; Independent Practitioners’ Network.


You can find out more about us here.