Opacity and inertia at the BPS

This letter was sent to the Chair of the Board of Trustees, the President, the CEO and the Chair of the Practice Board (via email) at 0700 on Thursday 18 September, having been drafted the day before. By 0930 on Thursday 18 September the Minutes of the Board of Trustees meeting held in May 2025 appeared on the BPS website. As an aside, it is surprising that the Board hadn’t met since December 2024, a gap of 4 months. For comparison purposes the Board met eight times in 2021, nine times in 2022, five times in 2023 and five times in 2024. The minutes of the Practice Board (as of 0950 on Thursday 18 September) remain unpublished.

Dear Chair,

I write to you repeating concerns expressed since the inception of BPSWatch.com,  which was formed 5 years ago by three people who between them had more than 150 years continuous membership, track records of holding significant office within the Society and lifetime careers as practitioners. We have repeatedly during that period raised failures of openness transparency and accountability as well as restriction of debate around contentious issues.

We have had to contact the Society on a number of occasions to point out that minutes are not posted in a timely fashion for key boards. 

Importantly, there are no minutes of the Board of Trustees meetings for the whole of 2025 and it is now September. Have any meetings actually taken place? If so, why is it not seen as important to post records of the deliberations and decisions?

There are no minutes for the Practice Board since those for March 3rd, a gap of six months. Information on the of this Board should be a key focus for practitioner psychologists as they should inform us about matters discussed relating to the interface with public policy, public institutions, media and the wider public. The workings of the Practice Board should enable practitioner members to understand and contribute to the thinking, discussion and practice development of applied professional psychology in the UK. Many current and important policy issues clearly have psychology and psychologists at their heart. The almost information-free Practice Board Minutes of 3rd March do nothing to assist, let alone engage, practitioners in matters directly impinging upon their work. Taking the very high profile matter of post-Cass development of NHS services, the minutes merely state “Children and Young People Gender Group: The first meeting has taken place, and a discussion paper is in development”. Apparently nothing further is forthcoming since 6 months ago. Given that the Chair of the Practice Board and the President know from direct contact with concerned psychologists how much anxiety and energy was invested by senior practitioners in ensuring that post-Cass there would be credible input to future services, this parlous situation is wholly unacceptable. A further question, in the absence of any information whatsoever, concerns the ongoing dislocation of the BPS and the content of its Gender Guidelines from current review and policy discussion of adult gender services in England and Wales. We know that the ACP UK have been actively involved.

We received an assurance from the Chair of the Practice Board that given the gaps between meetings and the ratification of minutes there would be helpful updates of relevant policy development. These have not materialised.

Nor, as far as we are aware have there been helpful updates on any regular basis from the CEO, something we were led to expect when he was appointed. There is no open discussion of the BPS’s challenges and problems.

The Annual Report made available for the AGM was entirely unhelpful. It consisted of embarrassingly hearty self-congratulatory PR and little else beyond accounts which tell us we are now paying four senior staff over £100k per year, 2 of whom receive over £140k. There is declining membership reported, now significantly below 60k and many reports to us of poor Customer Relations Management. However, your restructuring saw the conspicuous disappearance of a Director level head of Membership and Professional Standards. You intend to sell off the Leicester Office base. This all sounds to members like declining health of the organisation, yet we are given no idea whatsoever what possibly questionable business plans have been running the Society from behind the scenes, and whether a radical change of course is desperately needed. From our position it seems that the focus is most definitely NOT on the professional career section of psychologists and a there is widely reported hostile reluctance to engage with senior experienced professional psychologists unless they toe particular ideological lines. This of course is a well known symptom of managerialism’s efforts to contain and suppress senior members who may challenge. BPS members are paying a lot for an unsatisfactory level of support and general performance. When we have challenged this, as we are entitled to do, this is deemed to be attacking staff personally rather than critiquing performance and outcomes. 

The BPS only exists because of members’ subscriptions. Paid and elected officers are accountable to that membership. Depriving that membership of information concerning matters of policy and decision making can  be deemed misgovernance and goes against Charity Commission requirements. 

Pat Harvey 

on behalf of BPSWatch.com