Paid panel service: repeat hearings, training and public accountability

A hearing role is not a clinical qualification

The HCPC uses a mixture of lay members, registrant members and panel chairs. The independent legal assessor supports questions of law and procedure. A lay member does not have to be qualified in the profession being assessed: that is part of the design of lay participation, rather than evidence that the rules have been broken.

The HCPC says panel chairs have prior experience of fitness-to-practise hearings or comparable proceedings and receive regular chair training. It also publishes competency requirements. It would therefore be inaccurate to assert that all lay chairs have no relevant qualifications or training.

Can people sit on multiple hearings?

Yes. Appointments are to the relevant committee pool, and members can be invited to participate in different proceedings. But this is not an unrestricted appointment for life. Under the consolidated rules, membership of one or more Practice Committees is subject to an aggregate eight-year limit during any twenty-year period, with an express historical exception for service before July 2007.

A restriction on years of membership is different from a cap on the number of hearings a person can attend in one year. We did not identify a published distribution showing how many cases each anonymised panel member heard, so claims about an unusually dominant cadre of repeat decision-makers need further evidence.

How appointments and payment work

The HCPC's 2025 partner report records recruitment, induction and training. For a reported quarter, 29 registrant panel members were appointed from 137 applicants and eight panel chairs were appointed from 36 applicants in an internal chair campaign. The HCPC partner policy says panel members and chairs are paid for hearing work.

A 2026 HCPC recruitment advertisement, reproduced by an external job service, described a panel-chair rate of £348 per hearing day plus separately described benefits, and an expected commitment of ten to fifteen days annually. These are published advertised terms, not evidence of any particular individual's income or improper influence.

A better accountability test

The important audit questions are: How many hearings does a member attend per year? How often do the same three members sit together? What are the objective criteria for appointment and reappointment? How is perceived bias identified and managed? Are conflicts recorded? What specialist expertise is available? How is training evaluated, and how are successful appeals used to improve panel competence?

HCPC&Me proposes a periodically published, anonymised panel-service dataset showing professional role, broad expertise, annual hearing volume, tenure band, training completion and aggregate appeal outcomes. The aim should be evidence-led accountability while respecting independence and privacy, not the targeting of individual public servants.

Counter-evidence

The HCPC reported in public 2025 committee minutes that panel members were randomly selected, except that the registrant member must match the profession. Random assignment can protect impartiality, but the impact on technical expertise can reasonably be studied. The HCPC also reported substantial induction and refresher training, which should be acknowledged.