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The Editor of the British Journal of Psychotherapy asked the BCP Council if we would like to write an article about the history of the Confederation to accompany Michael Pokorny's history of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP). We were pleased to accept the invitation as both umbrella organisations have their roots in the publication of the Foster Report of 1971. That Report was the outcome of a government-commissioned investigation carried out by Sir John Foster. The Report recommended that, for the protection of the public, psychotherapists in the United Kingdom should be registered. Subsequently a Professions Joint Working Party, chaired by Paul Sieghart, was established to develop in more detail the proposals of the Foster Report. A number of the BCP member organisations were members of that Working Party. A Report was published in 1978 which also recommended a statutory scheme of regulation for psychotherapists in order ‘to protect the public from unscrupulous or incompetent practitioners’. For many reasons no British government has wanted to introduce statutory legislation of psychotherapists but the present government has encouraged voluntary registration. One of the consequences of all these developments is that both the UKCP and the BCP are now publishing registers.
In many ways the UKCP has attempted to do something more complex and difficult than the BCP: it has attempted to form a structure which encompasses a large range of psychotherapies, both well established at the time of the Foster Report and newly developed since then. This has been an admirable undertaking and we have already congratulated the UKCP on their achievements in bringing some cohesion to a fragmented field.
However, a sign that in the long term the impressively plural field of psychotherapy was likely to need to be contained in more than a single national register occurred prior to the establishment of the UKSCP (United Kingdom Standing Conference for Psychotherapy), now