[1] Later that month, the HPC's Chief Executive Marc Seale wrote to Anne Milton MP, then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Public Health, seeking clarification of the coalition government's policy on the statutory regulation of psychotherapists and counsellors.
Membership was extended to include individuals when in 1977, with the aid of a grant from the Home Office Voluntary Service Unit, the British Association for Counselling (BAC) was founded.
In 1978 the headquarters was moved from London to Rugby courtesy of the National Marriage Guidance Council which provided free accommodation to help the association establish itself.
During the 1980s, the BAC began the process of professionalising counselling in Britain, first introducing a code of practise for counsellors (1986), a member's register and a complaints panel for clients.
The National Counselling Society (NCS)[5] is a not-for-profit membership organisation, founded by a group of counsellors, psychotherapists, psychologists and hypnotherapists in 1999.
The aim of the NCS is to promote and support the practice of counselling, and does so by offering a range of services to members, including a comprehensive training programme.
According to the introduction on their website in 2007, the Counselling Society launched a campaign by contacting every UK MP, Peer and other national stakeholder via Blake's Parliamentary Yearbook.