Introducing the HIPC interim chair and vice chair

A letter to HIPC members from your interim college chair

Dear member of HIPC,

I am writing to you as an individual member of HIPC-UKCP to bring you up to date and inform you about the process by which, in HIPC, we now have an interim chair and an interim vice chair, who are myself, Heward Wilkinson, interim chair, and Bill Adlard, interim vice chair.

In early April, Jon Levett, UKCP CEO, and Christian Buckland, chair of UKCP (since resigned), requested a meeting with Gill Westland, the HIPC rep for the UKCP Professional Regulatory Committee for the Colleges and Faculties (PRCCF), to catch up on urgent outstanding HIPC-UKCP issues. This was in the context of the impact of UKCP’s initial announcement on 5 April of UKCP’s withdrawal from the Memorandum of Understanding on Conversion Therapy, which had disturbed many HIPC people and their organisations.

At Gill Westland’s request, they agreed that Bill Adlard (see below) and I could join the meeting as well. We discussed the outstanding issue of HIPC leadership. This has been hanging in the air for a long time. The HIPC Executive have developed a consensual way of working which has served us well since 2014 when no one came forward to stand as chair when Tree Staunton’s term came to an end. But, whether rightly or wrongly, the pressure from, and on, the Board of UKCP to have a single communication/leadership figure speaking for HIPC has been maintained and increased.

As I, HW, reflected on this it seemed to me at last that we needed to cut to the chase and so I reached a decision to offer to put myself forward for the role of interim chair of the College, as no one else has seemed willing to offer themselves. As a result of this decision, Bill Adlard then felt able to offer himself for the role of College interim vice chair. The situation was accepted by the Executive of HIPC, and then the College Delegate Meeting of 23 May. These are appointed time-limited roles and the intention is to make possible the review of HIPC leadership processes which has been pending during the challenging period UKCP and HIPC have been through.

We have therefore many urgent issues to face now. The legitimate proposal from members of the trans community to ask UKCP to hold a removal election regarding the UKCP Board of Trustees has led to an electoral process which resulted in a strong vote against removal, and at the same time brought the concerns of trans and non-binary persons into centrality within the debates about equalities.

Among other urgent issues we have to face are:

• Leadership of the College: the College needs to consider what leadership model it would prefer and empower the Executive to pursue resolution on that basis. We need to begin this process on 26 July.
• Climate breakdown: the evolution of individual and organisational members' thinking and training on the basis of this overwhelmingly urgent imperative needs to continue.
• Equalities, in particular trans and non-binary Issues: training opportunities in relation to all of these issues are envisaged and being pursued.
• Issues about the recognition and accreditation of work with children: these long-standing questions have now become acute and we need to consider what kinds of discussion we need to have with UKCP on all of this.
• Supervision issues: in the context of training, progress is being made on rationalising the recognition of supervisors within the College.
• Modality identity and the advent of artificial intelligence (AI): in terms of our modality visions, there are issues arising in relation to AI and other developments which, medium term, need to get into the debates.
• Research Committee: the Research Committee will need new leadership.
• Recruitment: more widely, we need to urgently address our recruitment issues.
• Direct members' reaccreditation: a major start on this, in identifying Heather Reeves, who is very experienced and willing to lead the process of catching this up. Details remain to be resolved but this is a major step forward.

I hope I have not forgotten anything, but I am confident I shall be reminded if I have!

Please feel free to inform yourself. If you are not already coming because you are a delegate, you are welcome to attend the next HIPC meeting online on Friday, 26 July as guest, but please notify us if you intend to attend, by writing to HIPCadmin@ukcp.org.uk. I look forward to engaging with you all.

Heward Wilkinson
Interim chair, HIPC-UKCP

Your HIPC vice chair

Bill Adlard qualified as a barrister in 1978 and practised law in London and on the Western Circuit until 1999. He trained as a healer in 2006-2011 and then took the psychotherapy diploma at the CCPE in 2013-2019. He is now in private practice, specialising in trauma related work and with a keen interest in internal family systems (IFS).

Because of his legal background, Bill was asked to join the HIPC steering committee in 2022, now renamed the Executive Committee. He is a member of the UKCP Strategy Working Group (SWG), which will report to the general meeting part of the UKCP conference on 22 November 2024 with a strategy for the next three years. He was recently appointed vice chair of HIPC, under the chairship of Dr Heward Wilkinson, with a prime task of overseeing the extension of voting rights to all individual members of HIPC.