Peter Jenkins analyses the results of the recent election for the Chair of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP), a leading professional association for psychotherapists in the UK.
The results for the election of a new Chair of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy are now out, with a clear victory for the sitting pro-EDI candidate, Pippa Donovan. The challenger, Sue Parker Hall, came from a standing start, and achieved almost a quarter of the votes, with only a scratch team of supporters, and a clear message on the need to return to traditional psychotherapy values.
The results were as follows:
Pippa Donovan: 1,733 votes (77% total)
Sue Parker Hall: 518 votes (23% total)
Total votes cast: 2,251 votes
The turnout of UKCP members eligible to vote (11,000 approx) was 25%. This was somewhat lower than for the previous UKCP election turnout. In 2024, an attempt to unseat the entire UKCP Board for their decision to withdraw from the controversial Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy (MOU) resulted in a turnout of 33%, producing a clear endorsement of the Board’s stance by 80% of those voting.
The election campaign was not without its moments of drama. Sue’s previous social media history was trawled for allegedly problematic material on issues unrelated to her campaign, while her recent very relevant posts on the need to return to a non-politicised therapy were ignored. An online petition which questioned her suitability even to stand as a candidate garnered 1,352 signatures, roughly a third of which were from UKCP members. The latest issue of the New Psychotherapist, with articles endorsing the UKCP’s revamped EDI strategy, just happened to land in every UKCP member’s inbox, with apparently perfect timing, in the narrow window of time permitted for candidates campaigning prior to voting.
The underlying deep malaise affecting the UKCP is still apparent, however. The UKCP seems unwilling to learn the crucial lesson that full-throttle Equity, Diversion and Inclusion (EDI) policies run a high risk of incurring mounting legal and insurance costs and also of serious reputational damage. This was the fall-out of the successful case brought by James Esses, settled out of court by the UKCP last year (Jenkins, 2025). Future grievance-based cases over EDI against UKCP member organisations are already waiting in the wings, after yet another case against the unfortunate Metanoia Institute failed at Employment Tribunal last year.
EDI policies, however glossily presented in the UKCP journal, are potentially in direct conflict with the established rights of gender-critical and race-critical therapist members to hold and express their views under the Equality Act 2010, even at the risk of causing offense to others.
So perhaps the UKCP needs take some of its own medicine, and sign up for a course of reality-based therapy before going much further?
References
Jenkins, P. (2025) UKCP and the legal risks of full throttle EDI. Critical Therapy Antidote.https://criticaltherapyantidote.org/2025/02/04/ukcp-and-the-legal-risks-of-full-throttle-equity-diversity-and-inclusion/
Legal reference
Hussein et al v. Metanoia Institute ET 2217082/2023 https://www.gov.uk/employment-tribunal-decisions/e-hussein-and-others-v-the-metanoia-institute-2217082-slash-2023-and-others
By Peter Jenkins, counsellor, supervisor, trainer and researcher in the UK. He has been a member of both the BACP Professional Conduct Committee and the UKCP Ethics Committee. He has published a number of books on legal aspects of therapy, including Professional Practice in Counselling and Psychotherapy: Ethics and the Law (Sage, 2017). https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/author/peter-jenkins
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