Category: Annual Report

Peter Harvey posts….

Members will be ecstatic to know the BPS is so proud of the fact that it was able to handle over 38 000 emails last year that it got a special shout-out in the CEO’s introduction to the Annual report (see here). In fact, this is such a significant achievement that it is the very first fact that he mentioned. I can hardly contain my sense of pride in the Society’s important step towards its aim of promoting the advancement and diffusion of psychological knowledge, both pure and applied (see the Royal Charter). But there is more – 244 queries directly relating to practice issue were responded to (another highlight from the CEO’s report). This is all too much excitement at my age.

I really, really would like to say that it gets better but the Annual Report is a shambles – trivial, over-confident, smug and looks as if it is a not-very-good trainee’s branding and PR project. I expect next year’s will be published electronically in emojis. To save you the effort of having to expose yourself to the glossy visual overload and assorted trivia, here are my key take-aways.

Falling membership. One of the more serious and worrying facts is that membership is falling. The total in 2024 was 58 387, down from 61 149 in the year before and, most significantly, from 66 098 in 2020. It is inordinately difficult to find accurate membership figures if we want to put this in a historical context: in 2018 it was said to be “...just above the 60 000 mark…”;  in 2019, two different figures are quoted, one of  60 000 and one of 70 000 (both approximations); I cannot find a figure for either 2021 or 2022. I would have thought that the all-singing, all-dancing £6m Change Programme (about which we have yet to receive a full evaluation – bland reiteration of the phrase “…it has been a great success…” simply won’t do) would be able to provide such information at the touch of a button. I have been a member long enough to remember when the full membership figures (including past years) were a regular feature of the Annual Report (and this was before the much hyped Change Programme). This fall in membership is important especially in light of some other data and it links to finance (see below). According to the Board of Trustees (BoT) minutes of 16 December 2024, 18% of members benefit from free membership (full disclosure, as a retired member I am in this category), including first-year students. In the BoT Minutes of 8 May 2025 it is stated that “… significant numbers of students do not continue membership when it continues to be free and many graduate members cease to be members when the discounted rate ends…”. As subscriptions make up 57% of the BPS’s total income this is a worrying trend.

Psychology as a career. The Psychology Careers Festival which was attended by 2596 people is heralded as a significant success (page 7 of the Annual Report). Perhaps some context might help here. According to the Higher Education Statistics Agency latest figures (see here) some 119 120 people were studying psychology in 2024/25 (an interesting side note here – this is a significant drop from a peak of 141 095 in 2022/23).  Considering there were 120 speakers over 80 sessions (a large investment of time both organisationally and by the speakers) I am not sure that getting just under 3% of your target population is an outstanding success.

Staffing. Hidden deep within the impenetrable financial report (see below) is this important fact. In 2023 the BPS underwent a restructuring process – this resulted in the loss of 30 posts (including 12 voluntary and 4 compulsory redundancies) (see page 60 of the Annual Report and there is more on this below under Finance). How much of the detail of the restructuring and change, as well as the need for it, has been fully and properly reported to the membership who actually pay for all this? A gentle reminder here to the BoT and the Senior Management Team about their accountability to the membership – it is both a moral duty and a requirement of the Charity Commission to tell us what is happening to our Society.

What’s missing. To my mind there is a great deal missing from the main body of the report. No mention of how the BPS has responded to a key shift in the law (the Supreme Court ruling on Sex and Gender), the fact that two serious incident reports have been made to the Charity Commission (see BoT Minutes, 16 December 2024, Item 1.8), no mention of the fact that the BPS has been running a “…number of years of deficit budgets…” (see BoT Minutes, 16 December 2024, Item 2.3, Noted 3). There is much more so I suggest that you read past blog posts on BPSWatch.com to find out what you are missing (and then we can trumpet the fact that our numbers are up).

Finance. In stark contrast to the glossy fluffiness and inanities of the previous 29 pages, the financial statements are an accountant’s delight. Opacity and complexity spring to mind as apt descriptors. Is this a deliberate ploy to obfuscate and confuse the inexpert reader (as are all of us not versed in the mysterious jargon of finance)? Why doesn’t the BPS present a simple one- or two-page graphic (complete with the ubiquitous pie chart) for us simple souls? Virtually every organisation of which I am a member (such as the Royal Society for the Protection Birds) manages this in their annual reports. If I could do this on my computer using Excel and PowerPoint (and no, I am not going to do it) surely the all-singing, all dancing IT system funded by a £6m Change Programme should be capable of this simple task? A more suspicious person than I might even suggest that this is not a mere accident – as I have noted in a previous post (see here), members are regularly denied important information about the finances of their society. And by the way, while we are on the topic of finance, how many of you knew that there have been six Heads of Finance over the past seven years . This is a rate of change that even I, untutored as I am in the ways of business, suggest is not a Good Thing.

So, to the detail (and apologies in advance if I have missed anything, this is not an easy task). 

1. Income is up. Yes, there is an approximately £1m increase in subscription income BUT, we have seen, this is not due to an increase in membership so, ipso facto, it is due to an increase in fees. This is not good – there will be a point at which members will ask the ‘value-for-money’ questions and I have already noted the fall-off in student and graduate members. In addition, there is (an admittedly small) drop in Chartered members but with organisations such as the Association of Clinical PsychologistsUK (full disclosure, of which I am a member) offering  a very attractive alternative to clinical psychologists, the BPS should be worried (especially as the Division of Clinical Psychology is still the largest of the sub-systems in the Society).
2. Income is down. In contrast to the above, other sources of income do not look good. The BPS has a number of revenue streams apart from membership fees. These include Registers and Directories (down from 2023), Conferences and Events (down from 2023), Journals and Book Publishing (down from 2023), Advertising revenue  (down from 2023), Examination income (down from 2023), Professional Development Centre (down from 2023). Two other streams (Quality Assurance and Rental Income) show an increase (see page 49 of the Annual Report for full details). This is a worrying trend as these declining sources are unlikely to increase and it only needs a change in the Quality Assurance stream (the largest) to be compromised and the BPS will need more than the sale of the Leicester office to keep afloat.
3. Staff costs. Staff costs are down due to the loss of people noted above, the overall cost of this exercise over the two years 2023 and 2024 being £763 000 and is unlikely to be repeated. However, there is a continuing cost of those on higher salaries (defined as those earning > £60 000 p.a.) of whom there are now 12 (down from 15 in 2023). Without making any value judgements or allusions to individuals, four of that number are earning over £100 000 p.a. (excluding pension contributions – see page 55 Annual Report) which (taking the median of the ranges provided) totals just over £500 000. I leave these figures with you upon which to contemplate.

As some of you know, I and my associates on BPSWatch have a long history with the BPS, contributing (we hope) positively and constructively to its aims of developing a responsible, serious and thoughtful science and practice of psychology. The current Annual Report (and those of the recent past) suggest that our efforts have so far been in vain and that the organisation is failing its members, the public and the discipline of psychology.