Bedford Community Counselling (BCC) opened in October 2012 with the express purpose of providing affordable counselling in Bedford and the surrounding areas. In addition to the two Directors, both of whom are highly qualified in Psychotherapy, other specialist therapies and clinical supervision, there are an additional fifteen therapists. BCC continues to offer a range of face to face, online/telephone only and blended approaches to clients. This more flexible way of working continues to receive positive feedback from clients and therapists. BCC was required to re-register for VAT in July 2025 as our income slightly exceeded the VAT threshold. Again, the impact of the increase meant that our client base decreased, which lowered our income to below the VAT threshold, and we therefore de-registered for VAT in January 2026. We remain committed to providing affordable counselling to our local community, and our current sliding scale of fees ranges from £35 to £65 per session for one-to-one therapy, and £75 per session for specialist therapies, including couples counselling. Our aim is to lessen the financial barrier to accessing counselling and specialist support. Our benchmarking practices continue to demonstrate that our fees are competitive with other similar services, and we are significantly less costly than many of the private counselling available in the area and online. Should we decide to increase our fees, we will endeavour to remain as competitively priced as possible. A large part of our generated income goes toward the cost of maintaining our ethos of offering affordable counselling, and so we continue to make changes to reduce our costs as much as we can. All of our counsellors are volunteers, but we are able to pay our qualified therapists for some of the sessions they provide each week. The majority of our therapists train with us and then choose to stay on after they have qualified, and we value the opportunity this offers to provide our community with a high quality and consistent service provided by qualified, dedicated and experienced therapists. Generally, we have been able to place new clients with a counsellor within two weeks from the point of initial assessment. We continue to see an increase in the number of men and couples who are seeking therapy through our service. We are pleased that the number of clients defaulting on payments has decreased. BCC continues to provide affordable high-quality management and clinical supervision to qualified and trainee therapists, including all BCC therapists but also external therapists. Our client profile shows that our commitment to equality is clearly represented in the diversity of our client base and their problems. We continue to develop partnerships with local GP surgeries and a number of clients have been signposted to BCC by their GP and the Bedfordshire Wellbeing Service. We have continued to offer short term and open-ended counselling in order to meet the unique needs of each client; clients are encouraged to choose how many sessions of affordable therapy they wish to have, which underscores their autonomy, rather than being “prescribed” a fixed number. The assessment measures we use are nationally recognised and evaluate a client’s global distress, anxiety and depression at the start and end of therapy. Overall, our clients’ scores indicate an improvement during the course of their counselling with BCC. BCC continues to develop a support network with other local counsellors in order to share best practice and to increase the capacity of BCC by creating partnerships with other professionals who can volunteer their ser-vices under the BCC name. BCC actively supports various Colleges, Universities and training providers: we provide affordable counselling for students training as therapists, alongside academic support and free agency visit/advice sessions to stu-dents wishing to learn more about therapy and who are required to research local counselling services as part of their training.

BCC's stakeholders are local residents in Bedford and the surrounding areas. BCC encourages feedback from all clients and other stakeholders and reflects carefully on the responses re-ceived. Clients can provide their feedback in a number of ways (directly to their therapist, via email, using our online form etc). Our website is informative and user friendly, and we believe that this has led to an improved method of communicating with our local community. The feedback we receive continues to support our development of the service we offer the local Community, especially around questions of affordability and accessibility.

No remuneration was received

No transfer of assets other than for full consideration