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It is with great pleasure and some sadness that I open the annual conference from the Chair for the last time. On Sunday morning my four years as your chairman will be over and a new chairperson will be elected. I am proud of our achievements together and look forward to our future as the Profession of Psychotherapy. I am very pleased that I will still have a part to play in the immediate future, as I have been appointed by Council to be the first Chair of the Registration Board.
Before I tell you how much we must do this weekend let me very quickly remind you of just how far we have travelled together since those far-off days of the Rugby Psychotherapy Conference.
After the Foster Report of 1971 and the collapse of the Professions Joint Working Party in 1978 came the Private Members Bill to regulate psychotherapy, which failed in 1981. That Bill was moved by Graham Bright MP who is still keeping in close touch with us and advising and helping us. In 1982 the British Association for Counselling invited organisations to the first of what was to develop into the Rugby Psychotherapy Conferences. Run on a shoestring those Rugby Conferences laid the groundwork for the Standing Conference which was inaugurated in 1989. Of course, by then we had outgrown Rugby and had settled here in Canterbury. In 1989 we had sixty-six organisations in membership. Since then we have grown to seventy organisations in spite of refusing entry to about forty and losing six. We expelled one last year and five left of their own accord.
At the Inaugural Meeting in January 1989 I recall saying to you that I wished that I had a shilling for every time somebody had said to me: ‘You will never get that lot to agree to anything’. In fact we have reached agreement on a wide variety of important matters. Since inauguration we have all worked very hard to get to the stage of agreeing the structures that we need to create and administer a Register of Psychotherapists and we will be putting those in place th