While many found the CMC's aborted attempt to regulate mediators an unnecessary and provocative venture, the consultation which followed December's AGM provides a useful snapshot of the profession at an interesting point in its history. It's 20 years since The ADR Group and CEDR began, and ten years since The Woolf Reforms tipped civil procedure in favour of swift, just and proportionate dispute resolution. 

In what state do we find mediation after all this time? 

If events at the CMC's EGM on 30 March are representative, the answer is pretty poor, in all senses. In what other profession would the head of an accredited organisation (the Association of Cambridge Mediators, in this instance) have to report that a proposed registration fee of £250 a year, split between 16 members, represented an intolerable financial burden? When a per capita cost of £1.30 a month is too much to bear, a rethink is long overdue.

As mediation enters its third decade in the UK, it's time to face facts. Averaging one NMH mediation a year, as those in the Association of Cambridge reportedly do, does not make you a mediator. What it makes you is a victim of the Great Mediator Training Con.  

Mediation doesn't need any more well-intentioned dupes, and training mediators has failed to grow the market. Training organisations might delude themselves into believing they're churning out the next generation of stellar mediators. They're not. When the bell goes and the pupils leave, they've just added a bunch more to the crowd of faces abandoned, unwanted, at the school gates.

Furthermore, while any available mediations are seized by wannabes who have no realistic prospect of building a practice, those with real talent and flair will never gain the experience necessary to fulfill their potential. Making money from those without a hope of practising is an ethical issue; shafting mediation's future at the same time merely adds to the burden.

The accepted rationale that mediator training helps advisers understand the process and therefore enables them to better serve their clients at mediation is, I suggest, misconceived. Mediation advocates should not be focused on what the mediator is doing. That is a distraction. Effective advocates are focused on the negotiation, not the messenger. Given how few accomplish this well, efforts might be better focused on mediation advocacy and negotiation training.

Out in the real world companies are finding efficiencies through cutting costs, cutting headcount and trimming off the fat. Mediation, by contrast, is getting more bloated and less efficient. CMC treasurer Richard Schiffer announced with some glee at the EGM that the number of accredited organisations might hit 100 this year, up from 63 at present. Good news for the CMC coffers; bad news for the market. Mediation buyers have problems, certainly, but lack of choice is nowhere among them. 

When the CMC returns to its task of promoting mediation, it would do well to consider the health of the herd. And it might conclude that a cull would be the kindest thing.