Therapists may wish to bear ethics in mind.

 In 2015 Therapy Today published a piece wondering if it was ethical for counsellors and psychotherapy to participate in Workfare:

“In their 2015 election manifesto the Conservative Party said that claimants who ‘refuse a recommended treatment’ may risk having their benefits reduced. The pre-election budget allocated funds to place IAPT therapists in 350 Jobcentres throughout England; the possibility that claimants may be required to attend a course of CBT treatment to improve their ‘employability’ or risk losing benefits has become very real.”

https://www.bacp.co.uk/bacp-journals/therapy-today/2015/july-2015/should-counsellors-work-with-workfare/ 

BACP, BPS and UKCP offered ethical guidance:

 “Individual psychologists will have to make their own decisions about working in this way, bearing in mind that so many professional bodies, including the BPS, have made it clear that it is ethical to offer people therapy only in the context of a free and informed choice.”

 “The principle of autonomy opposes the manipulation of clients against their will, even for beneficial social ends,” and BACP members should “seek freely given and adequately informed consent” from clients.

“Therapists involved in such work may wish to bear the ethical dimensions in mind.”

As long as counsellors and psychotherapists might wish to bear some ethical dimensions in mind they had the blessing of their professional membership bodies to work with people who had been given the choice to meet a therapist or lose their benefits. 

It had taken nearly a decade for our professional bodies to consider the most basic psychotherapeutic principles. In 2008 BACP grasped at the concept that 'Work Is Good For You' because it offered what they identified as 'huge opportunities' for counsellors and psychotherapists. 

In April 2016 Therapy Today became concerned about the links between IAPT and the DWP:

“BACP and its fellow professional associations have stated clearly and publicly that they oppose any use of therapy purely to get people back into work; that the therapy should always be completely voluntary and unrelated to any mandatory work-related package; that the focus should always be on the issues that the client brings to therapy, and that it should be provided in a therapeutically appropriate environment.”

The DWP subsequently invited BACP to visit a clinic above a Job Centre performing this work. The clinical psychologist who owned the private business and the DWP District Operations Manager both thought it was going very well but BACP didn’t get to talk to any claimants. Neither did they seem to be aware that one does not just walk into a Job Centre. Job Centres were never open to the public. Security guards always stood at the door, not where they had an overview of the office.

BACP became so alarmed “that employment may be regarded as a clinical outcome of psychological therapy" that they wrote an entire letter to the government.

This rather missed the point that 'psychological therapy' had been explicitly used as a means to move people into employment for several years; that BACP and other professional membership bodies entirely embraced the government concept of Work Is A Health Outcome; that their own enthusiasm for this project when it was first announced and in subsequent years had given, not just permission but encouragement to their members to do precisely what they were now alarmed about.

The letter was no doubt posted and that was the end of the matter, for BACP, the government and the profession.