Our response to refreshed NHS 10-Year Workforce Plan for England
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With the demand for mental health support in the NHS still rising, we’ve urged the Government to consider the thousands of trained counsellors and psychotherapists ready and available to help expand access and improve patient care.

In our response to the Department of Health and Social Care’s call for evidence on the refreshed , we highlighted that only 6% of our members currently work in the NHS, despite 66% expressing a desire to do so.

We represent more than 50,000 qualified members and 10,000 trainees in England, many of whom have unused clinical capacity that could deliver up to 120,000 additional counselling hours per week if fully deployed.

If NHS England tapped into this capacity, it would help it meet the country’s growing mental health needs.

A fragmented workforce limits access

In our response, we explained that over the past 15 years the NHS has created new roles to fill gaps in mental health services. While this has addressed some immediate needs, it has also made the psychological therapies workforce more fragmented.

Instead of drawing on the existing pool of highly trained counsellors and psychotherapists already working outside the NHS, these established professionals have often been overlooked.

We emphasised that: ‘Counsellors possess core competencies that make them highly flexible and adaptable. Their skills allow them to respond to pressures across primary care, community mental health, and wider NHS services.’

We also warned that failing to fully integrate counselling into the workforce will limit public access to effective therapies and undermine the professional standing of qualified therapists.

Pilots and training programmes are paving the way forward

We welcomed a couple of recent NHS initiatives that have successfully integrated counselling and psychotherapy into services, including:

• Top-up training for counsellors and psychotherapists within NHS Talking Therapies for Anxiety and Depression
  
  
• The Psychotherapeutic Counselling Core Training pilot, which is creating a direct pathway into the NHS workforce for new practitioners

In our response, we encouraged NHS England to build on the success of these initiatives by making them permanent and expanding their reach, so that the full value of our members’ expertise can benefit more people.

Our seven key recommendations

We recommended the following:

• Make the Psychotherapeutic Counselling Core Training pathway permanent
  
  
• Develop an action plan to deploy 120,000 additional counselling hours per week
  
  
• Expand psychological therapies into multi-disciplinary teams across physical health services
  
  
• Work with us to develop a pilot and evaluate models for embedding counselling into the Neighbourhood Health Service Model
  
  
• Develop an AI framework to ensure that new technologies are used safely, ethically and effectively in therapeutic settings — always enhancing, not replacing, the human connection at the heart of counselling and psychotherapy.
  
  
• Improve referral pathways making it easier for people to get the right support at the right time — reducing the need for repeated discharges and re-referrals, and helping service users experience more consistent, continuous care
  
  
• Expand the psychological therapies workforce

Government must commit to growing the therapy workforce

Matthew Smith-Lilley, our Mental Health Policy and Engagement Lead said:

“While the Government appears to be scaling back the major workforce expansion promised in the 2023 plan - placing more emphasis on technology and AI to drive productivity - there must still be a clear commitment to growing the psychological therapies workforce faster than the overall NHS average. This matters deeply.

"Access to psychological therapies is already below the level needed to meet rising demand, which continues to grow faster than workforce capacity. Our members have the skills, passion and experience to help close this gap and would transform care for thousands of people across the country.

“We will continue to advocate directly to Government and stand ready to work in partnership with the Department of Health and NHS England to ensure that everyone can access timely, effective mental health support."