Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to help prevent people without accreditation from offering paid counselling services.

There are no current plans to extend statutory regulation to therapists and counsellors, and no recent assessment has been made of the potential impact of the lack of statutory regulation on patient safety.

When considering which professions should be protected in law the Government is clear that the level of regulatory oversight must be proportionate to the risks to the public, and that statutory regulation of healthcare professionals should only be used where the risks to public and patient protection cannot be addressed in other ways, such as through employer oversight or accredited voluntary registration. Decisions about which professions are regulated, and which professional job titles are protected, are made by the Government and by Parliament.

Health professionals that are not subject to statutory regulation can join voluntary registers accredited by the Professional Standards Authority for Health and Social Care (PSA). The Government would encourage anyone accessing mental health services to use a practitioner who is subject to statuary regulation or voluntary registration accredited by the PSA.