UKCP Bulletin Issue 12

Apr 2011

Welcome to UKCP Bulletin 12

These Bulletins are a quick and effective way for the Chair and Chief Executive to keep you informed. Our policy is to communicate to our members about all the most important issues facing the organisation, and to listen to your responses.

This Bulletin is about subscriptions. It sets out plans which have been discussed by the Board, the Strategic Committee and the Finance Committee, and we are grateful for the input of our Honorary Treasurer, Frank Rodrigues.

To respond to the issues raised in this Bulletin, please email or share your views on the UKCP website forum at www.psychotherapy.org.uk/discussion_forum.html.
Andrew Samuels, UKCP Chair and David Pink, UKCP Chief Executive

Why a fee rise is needed
After careful consideration, the UKCP Board has decided that, after three years, a fee rise is needed. Hopefully, this email will explain why it is necessary and desirable.

We are mindful that, in the current climate, any decision to raise the level of fees will have to be justified to members, many of whose personal finances are being stretched. In this document, we will walk you through the figures. We would also like to acknowledge that this rise comes at a time when our new membership systems have not been working well. We are very sorry for this, but the situation is gradually improving.

Moving our innovations into our regular budget
In meetings and by responding to the Bulletins, many of you have let us know you have appreciated the various innovations within UKCP. As you may recall, these are funded from our development budget which is deliberately supported by our reserves at the moment, a decision the Board took in January 2010. We need to move these items into the regular budget, now that their worth has been established.

For example, if we want to open entry to our profession and make psychotherapy accessible to a much wider range of the public, we will need to retain the diversity, equalities and social responsibility work at its present level. A fee rise is necessary to do this out of our regular budget. Otherwise, UKCP and the professions of psychotherapy and psychotherapeutic counselling will continue to remain as constricted by ethnic and class factors as they are at present.

Changing the way psychotherapy is perceived
It is essential that UKCP changes the way psychotherapy is perceived in the public domain, if our members are to be fully recognised. We need to make an increased investment in research targeted at raising the level of recognition of psychotherapists and psychotherapeutic counsellors in the NHS and public sector workplace. In the money gained by the fee rise, we are proposing allocating a sum of around £2 per member to contribute to the funding of this kind of research conducted by the Research Faculty.

We are also suggesting a similar contribution of £2 per member to the funding of the Faculty for the Psychological Health of Children. (We will also fund our Faculties from general funds, of course, but we feel that there should be these per capita payments as well.)

Regulation costs
Now that we know there will be no statutory regulation by the Health Professions Council, we will have to put more resources into upgrading and improving our current voluntary regulation. We will want to keep it light-touch and agile - but there are some overall changes we will have to make.

(For the sake of transparency, we want to add there is likely to be a further sum asked of you at some time in the future for your eventual participation in the extension of the Central Complaints Process to everyone. However, this will save your UKCP organisational member some costs and may be reflected in your annual fee.)

The new shape of UKCP and the transition to a membership organisation are costly and perhaps some of the financial implications were not addressed thoroughly enough in the past. We are controlling costs as carefully as possible: there is a virtual freeze on staff pay, Board meetings are held in our own offices, there are no free places at conferences. Every expenditure has to be justified.

We do not know what the costs of accreditation by the Council for Health and Regulatory Excellence, or for voluntary registration with HPC, will be. We do know that for CHRE there will be no fee levied on individuals but only on the organisation as a whole. Generally, we think the costs for assured voluntary regulation via CHRE accreditation will work out at less for each of you than the £76 fee for statutory registration with HPC. So the amount you have to expend each year on 'memberships' will reduce in this respect.

We think that many of you claim tax relief on the UKCP membership fee but we have no data on this.

Growing our modalities
There is another and extremely important financial development to mention in connection with this fee rise. We want to move our colleges and faculties onto a completely new financial basis whereby they have their own designated funds with which to grow their modality. The simplest way to do this is by a capitation per member of a college (with an upper and lower limit built in). UKCP would designate such amounts from general funds towards these purposes. We are thinking of a charge of around £6 per member. Hence a college with 500 members would receive a budget of £3,000 to develop its modality.

How it adds up
Thus far, you can see that we are considering that the fee rise required should enable us to contribute around £2 per member towards research, £2 towards the children's faculty, and a further £6 towards growing the colleges. These sums amount to £10.

All of this is, we think, a coherent and credible narrative of the financial implications of where UKCP is as it moves forward. As we said earlier, there has been no rise for three years. But there is also inflation to think about. Taking the direct debit fee of £141 as a baseline, and using the Retail Price Index, if the fee had been increased in line with inflation, it would now be £159 (an increase of £18).

Pulling all of these figures together, the Board has decided to establish a new direct debit basic fee for individual members (including direct members) at £175 from 1 September 2011.

(If you don't pay by direct debit, we will keep the £19 differential between paying by direct debit and paying by other means and not seek to increase this. In real terms, this is a saving for those of you who don't use direct debit. Nevertheless, we do recommend the direct debit scheme.)

You are therefore being asked to pay an additional annual fee of £34 (24% increase). As we have explained, about half the rise represents an increase for inflation and the other half is intended to protect and expand our innovations and developments, and support our colleges and the two faculties.

For those members who will have difficulties with paying their annual membership in one lump sum, we will offer payment by instalments.

We will keep the level of fees under review, particularly if further savings can be made. We are undecided as to whether to wait another longish period before reviewing the fees again, or to move to a system of annual increments. We would welcome your views on this.

Comparison with other organisations
In terms of comparisons, BPC charge an individual registration fee of £188 but are thinking about an organisational fee. BACP accredited training organisations pay £2,475 as a first time fee and then £1,375 every five years, plus between £200 and £492 as an organisational fee.

We charge a £900 organisational fee and some colleges charge up to £350 as an organisational fee.

It is difficult to make a completely accurate comparison but, broadly speaking, our increase puts our fee in the same general area as our competitors' fees.

Although this fee rise is a formal decision of the Board, we would, of course, listen to very strong arguments that were in favour of a different approach. Please send any comments to:

Andrew and David
PS We would like to draw your attention to the start of series 2 of In Treatment at 10.15pm on Friday on Sky Atlantic. This popular US TV show follows a psychotherapist's weekly sessions with his patients and with his own therapist. The programme was the lead feature in this week's Guardian G2 section with an interview with the star, Gabriel Byrne, followed by 'The experts' verdict' - a two-page spread in which four UKCP psychotherapists gave their personal views on the programme. We were really pleased to see such high-profile coverage of psychotherapy and UKCP practitioners, with promotion of our website as the place to find a therapist. You can read the interview with Gabriel Byrne here: www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/apr/26/gabriel-byrne-in-treatment?intcmp=239, and the psychotherapists' views here: www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/apr/26/in-treatment-british-psychotherapists.

Forthcoming UKCP events:

4 June 2011 - UKCP annual supervision conference (London)
25 June 2011 - UKCP annual research conference (London)
9 July 2011 - UKCP forum on recognition and regulation of psychotherapy (London and webconferencing)

We will send you more information about the two June conferences next week. In the meantime, you can find further details of these and other UKCP events at www.ukcp.org.uk/events or by contacting .