We’re urging the next Welsh Government to adopt policies that promote and enhance mental health and wellbeing, which utilise the skills, expertise and capacity of the counselling and psychotherapy workforce.
Our members across Wales could make a greater contribution to help address gaps in the mental health system if investment was available to unlock their capacity. You can help by reading our manifesto asks and then writing to all candidates standing for election in your constituency ask them to support our campaign.
Our manifesto and key asks
Download our manifesto to read all our asks in full.
What we're asking of the next Welsh Government:
Prioritise mental health and wellbeing
- Commit to re-appointing a Minister for Mental Health and Wellbeing and retaining the 10-year Mental Health and Wellbeing and Suicide Prevention and Self Harm strategies
- Improve understanding of population-level mental health trends through investing in a specific mental health national survey, similar to the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey (APMS) in England
- Undertake a review of the funding allocated to mental health services and suicide prevention in Wales to inform an enhancement to the budget to ensure it is sufficient to meet growing demand and to facilitate early intervention
Use the counselling workforce to strengthen NHS provision
- Commit to expanding the workforce to deliver Local Primary Mental Health Support Service (LPMHSS) assessments to reduce waiting times and improve responsiveness
- Expand opportunities for the counselling and psychotherapy workforce to help to meet workforce expansion targets in psychological therapies and increase access to treatment
Supporting Wales’s voluntary sector counselling services
- Voluntary sector providers have a vital role to play in the successful delivery of the 10-year mental health and wellbeing strategy and must be given sustainable multi-year contracts, nationally and through local provision
- They must also receive parity of funding and esteem with statutory services with NHS referrals followed by commensurate funding
- In line with the Wales Alliance for Mental Health, we’d like to see a new ringfenced Mental Health Prevention and Innovation fund, to explore approaches that divert from, or reduce pressure on secondary support by creating community-based approaches led by the voluntary and community sector
Extend and strengthen school-based counselling
- Extend funded primary school therapeutic and counselling services to children across Wales, learning from international best practice, initially through a pilot programme
- Embed the learning from BACP’s review of Secondary School Counselling to deliver greater uniformity in support and deliver even better outcomes for Children and Young People across Wales
Ban conversion practices in Wales
- Within its powers, we call on the next Welsh Government to deliver against Action 3 of the LGBTQ+ Action Plan for Wales to ban all aspects of LGBTQ+ conversion practices. Any ban must be inclusive, effective, workable, and mustn’t lead to unintended consequences around therapists’ ability to work with gender and sexually diverse clients
How you can help support our campaign
We’re asking our members in Wales to join us in advocating for better mental health support across Wales by writing to candidates standing in the Senedd Election.
We’ve developed a simple template which sends an email to prospective parliamentary candidates in your constituency. This is a huge opportunity to promote the benefits of counselling and psychotherapy to the next members of Senedd.
Share your feedback with us
If you do speak to your candidate about counselling and psychotherapy over the election period, send your feedback to us at campaiging@bacp.co.uk