Report from the Working Party Chair

In January 1982 the British Association for Counselling (BAC) organised a conference of psychotherapy organisations. This was held at Rugby and was intended as a follow-up to the Foster Report of 1971, the Sieghurt Report of 1978 and the meeting at the DHSS in 1981.

Since then there has been an annual conference of representatives of psychotherapy organisations and related professional bodies. Still called the Rugby Conference to avoid any contentious titles, it has grown and changed and is now, we hope, on the point of setting up the Standing Conference for Psychotherapy. Our format has also changed considerably: at the beginning we met on Saturday morning until Sunday lunch. Then we began meeting from Friday evening to Sunday lunch, with an introductory debate or talk on the issue of creating a distinct profession of psychotherapy.

Today we begin with a report from the Working Party Chair, followed by reports from the category link-persons. We hope that this foreshadows our future annual conferences with our new federal structure - if we decide to go ahead with our current organisation. Tomorrow morning we shall face a decision on our future.

For tonight we are concerned with getting up to date. Since we last met here a year ago your Working Party has met three times, on each occasion for a day in London. As last year we were again this year a large Working Party. We differed sharply on a number of important issues so that our work included a fair share of strife. We hope that our ability to stay together will serve as a good model for Conference. Between meetings of the full Working Party we have all worked individually and in sub-groups and have fashioned a new constitution, built on a model of the previous one. We have also produced a model for inaugurating the Standing Conference for Psychotherapy. In addition we have coped with enquiries, comments, applications to join and the total rearrangement of our administration.

Until October 1987 we had been lucky enough