Leslie Richards
Introduction
Leslie Richards is a physiotherapist who was registered with the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) under registration number PH99661. On 28 February 2025, at the end of a substantive hearing that had opened the previous day, a panel of the Health and Care Professions Tribunal Service (HCPTS) erased him from the register. The panel found his fitness to practise impaired by reason of convictions recorded at Basildon Crown Court on 9 January 2024: two counts of assault by penetration and one count of actual bodily harm. It found a continuing risk to the public and no meaningful evidence of insight or remediation, directed erasure, and imposed an 18-month interim suspension to cover the appeal period.
Background Information
The published record identifies Richards as a physiotherapist holding HCPC registration PH99661. Beyond that it is sparse: the determination and his profile page say nothing about where he trained or worked, his age, or how long he had been registered, and this page does not guess at any of it. What the record does note is that he entered guilty pleas at the Crown Court and had a previously good regulatory history before these convictions. MedicWatch, an independent service that aggregates publicly published decisions of UK healthcare regulators without editorialising their findings, carries his case with erasure (struck off the register) as his most recent published outcome and notes his registration status as not yet verified.
The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation
Adjudicated vs. alleged. Leslie Richards’s convictions on two counts of assault by penetration and one count of actual bodily harm, recorded at Basildon Crown Court on 9 January 2024, were proved through the criminal process and are matters of court record; the HCPTS panel accepted the certificate of conviction and made those convictions the statutory ground of its decision. Everything beyond the convictions themselves — the panel’s assessments of his insight, remorse and the risk he may pose — is a regulatory finding, not a criminal fact. The published record identifies no charge that was acquitted, deadlocked or left unproved.
The case reached the HCPTS as a conviction allegation. As the determination records it: “It was alleged that on 9 January 2024 the Registrant was convicted at Basildon Crown Court of two counts of assault by penetration and one count of actual bodily harm, and that his fitness to practise was impaired by reason of those convictions.” The published record does not describe the circumstances of the offences, identify any victim, or state the sentence imposed; MedicWatch’s summary describes them collectively as “serious sexual and violent convictions” which the panel found created an ongoing public risk.
At the hearing, the panel found Particulars 1(a) and 1(b) proved from the certificate of conviction and found the statutory ground made out. It went on to find Richards’s fitness to practise currently impaired on both personal and public grounds, with a continuing risk of harm. In mitigation it identified two factors: that he had entered guilty pleas at the Crown Court, and that he had a previously good regulatory history.
Against that mitigation the panel set a heavier list of aggravating factors. It noted that Richards had been convicted of two serious criminal offences in relation to assault by penetration and actual bodily harm, “as reflected in the Judge’s sentencing remarks”; that the offences were “deliberate and premeditated”; that he had not demonstrated any meaningful insight into his behaviour since his convictions — a point it made while expressly noting his guilty pleas — and that there was no evidence before the panel that he had remediated his behaviour; and that he had not demonstrated any remorse.
On that basis the panel concluded that erasure was the proportionate outcome. It ordered that Richards be struck off the register and, so that the decision would hold for the duration of any appeal, imposed an 18-month interim suspension covering the appeal period.
Public Reaction and Consequences
The record here is quiet. No press coverage beyond MedicWatch’s own reporting of the determination appears in the published material, and the record contains no public statements from Richards, from any representative of his, or from any other party. The concrete consequences came from the regulatory process itself: an erasure direction removing him from the HCPC register, and an 18-month interim suspension to preserve that outcome through the appeal period. His profile page records erasure (struck off the register) as his most recent published outcome, notes his registration status as not yet verified, and directs readers to the official HCPC register for his current position. Beyond the tribunal process, the record is silent.
Current Status
Richards was struck off the HCPC register by the panel’s decision of 28 February 2025. Erasure removes him from the register, and the panel paired it with an 18-month interim suspension covering the appeal period; the published record does not state whether any appeal was in fact pursued. His MedicWatch profile carries the determination of 28 February 2025 — a substantive hearing before the Health and Care Professions Council — as his most recent published decision, marks his registration status as not yet verified, and points to the official HCPC register, and to the HCPC’s own published source determination, for his current registration details.
Impact on Their Career/Life
Striking off ended Richards’s registration and his ability to work as a physiotherapist in the UK. The case shows how a criminal court’s verdicts translate directly into loss of a professional registration: the panel did not need to re-examine the conduct, because the certificate of conviction proved the particulars, and its task became assessing the consequence for fitness to practise. What drove the sanction, on the panel’s own findings, was the absence of insight, remediation or remorse alongside convictions it treated as deliberate and premeditated, and its conclusion that he remained a continuing risk of harm. The record contains no information about the sentence he received in the criminal court or about his circumstances since the decision.