Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of introducing regulations for the professional use of the title psychologist.

In the United Kingdom, practitioner psychologists are already subject to statutory regulation by the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC), and HCPC’s legislation protects nine designated psychologist professional titles in law. This means that anyone not registered with the HCPC as a practitioner psychologist who uses one of these designated titles may be breaking the law and could be prosecuted.

The Government keeps the professions subject to statutory regulation under review and recently published a consultation, ‘Healthcare regulation: deciding when statutory regulation is appropriate’. The consultation ran from 6 January to 31 March 2022 and sought views on the criteria that should be used to determine when statutory regulation of a healthcare profession is appropriate.

Officials are currently analysing the responses to this consultation and the Government will publish its response in due course.