For years, one of the strangest gaps in family law was hiding in plain sight: “psychologist” isn’t a protected title in the UK. Anyone could use it. No registration, no regulator, no minimum standard of training required. In a system built on expert evidence shaping decisions about where children live and who they see, that gap mattered enormously — and for a long time, almost nobody outside the profession noticed.

That changed in 2023, when Sir Andrew McFarlane, President of the Family Division, used the judgment in Re C (“Parental Alienation”) to describe what he called a “confusing system” — one in which titles like psychologist, child psychologist, consultant psychologist, developmental psychologist and attachment psychologist could be used freely, with no legal meaning behind any of them. The British Psychological Society and the Family Justice Council responded with joint guidance setting out what should have been the baseline all along: that experts giving psychological evidence in family proceedings should be either HCPC-registered practitioners or BPS-chartered academics, with CVs that clearly and transparently set out registration numbers, specialist titles, qualifications and relevant experience.

Guidance, though, is only ever a recommendation. It relies on individual judges, solicitors and local authorities choosing to apply it. And investigative reporting over the past few years has made clear that plenty of unregulated practitioners continued to be instructed anyway, often giving strong opinions on matters as consequential as separating a child from a parent, without the accountability that comes with statutory regulation.

What actually changed this year

The Family Procedure (Amendment) Rules 2026, which came into force on 20 July 2026, turn that guidance into a rule. Expert witnesses in children’s proceedings must now be regulated by a UK statutory body (the HCPC being the obvious one for psychologists), registered with a Professional Standards Authority-accredited voluntary register, or otherwise regulated under the Legal Services Act framework. There’s a narrow exception: a court can still permit an unregulated expert, but only if it’s satisfied no regulated expert is reasonably available, or that the delay involved in finding one would itself cause harm to the child. That exception has to be justified on the record, not assumed.

In practice, this closes the loophole that guidance alone couldn’t. It’s no longer a matter of best practice to check an expert’s registration status before instruction — it’s a rule of court.

Why this is the right call, with one honest caveat

I think this is overdue, and I’ll say that plainly as someone who’s spent 24 years doing this work and now oversees a panel of over 300 experts. Families going through care proceedings, contact disputes or risk assessments are often at the most vulnerable point in their lives. The report an expert produces can shape a child’s future for years. That work should come with a floor of accountability: a professional body that can investigate a complaint, a register that confirms training and standing, a route to redress if something goes wrong. None of that existed for anyone happy to call themselves a “consultant psychologist” with no oversight attached.

But I don’t think this rule change is the whole answer, and it’s worth being honest about that rather than treating it as job done. Dr Jaime Craig, among others, has pointed out that accreditation on a voluntary register is itself not a uniform standard — it can create its own confusion about who’s genuinely qualified for a specific type of assessment. And Dr Kate Hellin’s point is one I’d underline for any solicitor reading this: HCPC registration is a minimum requirement, a starting point, not a guarantee that the person in front of you has the specific expertise your case needs. A registered psychologist with two decades in adult mental health services isn’t automatically the right fit for a complex parental alienation assessment. Regulation tells you someone is accountable. It doesn’t tell you they’re the right expert for this case.

What this means in practice for family law practitioners

A few things are worth building into instruction practice now, if they aren’t already:

  • Ask for evidence of registration as a matter of routine, not as an afterthought when something looks off. A CV should state the HCPC registration number, protected title, and BPS chartered status where relevant, and it should be checked against the register itself, not taken on trust.
  • Match the expertise to the question being asked, not just the letters after the name. Registration confirms accountability. It doesn’t confirm that this expert has done this kind of assessment, for this kind of case, before.
  • Document your reasoning if you’re instructing outside the regulated categories. Under the new rules, that’s no longer a judgement call you can make quietly — it needs to be justified to the court.

Expect this to tighten further, not loosen. Voluntary registers and accreditation frameworks are still maturing, and I’d expect further refinement of what counts as sufficiently regulated over the next few years.

Where this leaves the profession

I don’t think anyone in this field should be defensive about a rule that raises the floor. If a psychologist’s evidence can’t withstand scrutiny of their own qualifications, that was never a solid foundation for a court to build a decision on. What this change does is give solicitors, local authorities and judges a much clearer, enforceable way to ask the question that should always have been easy to ask: is this person actually who, and what, they say they are?

That’s not a burden on good practice. It’s a floor underneath it.