Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, whether his Department's NHS Standard Contract stipulates any requirements for providers, before they are granted a contract by an NHS commissioning body, to only employ counsellors and psychotherapists who are (a) accredited with professional bodies and (b) accredited with professional bodies which are Accredited Voluntary Registers.

Where National Health Service commissioners commission any healthcare services other than primary care – including counselling and psychotherapy services – they must use the NHS Standard Contract.

The Contract specifically requires providers to ensure that staff are registered with the appropriate professional regulatory body (GC5.3.1) and have the appropriate qualifications, experience, skills and competencies (GC5.3.2).

The Contract is used for a very wide range of services involving many different professions, and it would not be appropriate – within the nationally mandated text of the Contract – to list all of the professions and their regulatory bodies. However, where commissioners are commissioning counselling or psychotherapy services, they would produce a local service specification to describe the service they wish to commission. Commissioners may choose to include more precise requirements, relevant to individual professional groups, within these specifications, which would in turn form part of their local contracts.

With respect to guidance issued by the Department relating to the ‘Any Qualified Provider’ (AQP) programme, it has been for individual clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) as independent, autonomous organisations to decide on how best to procure clinical services since April 2013. During 2013/14, the Department continued some central support for CCGs, making tools and information available to help them qualify providers onto local AQP frameworks. However this was a transitional measure, and since April 2014 the qualification of providers has been for CCGs to take forward with support from Commissioning Support Services, as appropriate.