The maintenance of confusion concerning the meaning of these terms has two sources. Both currently have a convergent interest in producing befuddlement and masking the reality of state regulation by referring to it as statutory regulation. For more than a decade UKCP and BCP campaigned for statutory regulation in the hope of having their self-governing status as regulators confirmed by statute through Act of Parliament, an option explicitly denied to them by the government since 2002. Rather than clarify this switch point to their registrants, the bodies governing the psychotherapy field, soon to be joined by the BACP, have clung to the remnants of this project with its enticement to existing and potential registrants of enhanced status (anything prefaced with the word statutory is assumed to guarantee this) through the legal restriction of title, now however tied in with other decidedly more malign controls offered or rather to be imposed by the Health Professions Council, the second and more contemporary source of terminological confusion.

The HPC for its part is now actively mystifying the true state of affairs, where it can, hiding the fact of Department of Health/government involvement and implying that its own statutory constitution by order of the Privy Council (HPO2001) means it is offering the psy field statutory as opposed to state regulation. Its Chief Executive has recently disingenuously consigned the term state regulation to the HPC’s now defunct predecessor, the CPSM (Council for Professions Supplementary to Medicine), as if through a smart stroke of semantic conjuring the bothersome reality of state regulation could be airbrushed out of the picture. The government has quite clearly charged the HPC with regulating the psy field on its behalf, a coercive act that both the HPC and government would prefer to downplay, with its implementation two years away at the earliest giving time for resistance to develop.

In contradistinction to above lets call a spade a spade and speak of state regulation, without forked tongue.

eIpnosis is edited, maintained and © Denis Postle 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008