Non-surgical Aesthetic and Cosmetic Treatments

Alison Griffiths Excerpts

Thursday 11th September 2025 Westminster Hall

[Alison Griffiths (Bognor Regis and Littlehampton) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Desmond. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Bradley Thomas) for securing this important and increasingly pressing issue. I also thank the hon. Members for Putney (Fleur Anderson), for Strangford (Jim Shannon), for Calder Valley (Josh Fenton-Glynn) and for North West Leicestershire (Amanda Hack), who all made important contributions.

A report by the British Beauty Council showed that spending on non-surgical cosmetic treatments totalled £10.1 billion last year. That includes the 900,000 botox injections that are performed in the UK each year, and other non-surgical procedures, which continue to grow exponentially in popularity. We are not talking about a minor issue here; this is a multibillion-pound industry, which is snowballing at breakneck pace.

Yet this sector remains dangerously unregulated. Although there are training standards, such as the national occupational standards for practitioners in beauty aesthetics, there is no legislative framework to require all practitioners to meet those standards. As a result, some practitioners are not only unlicensed, but unqualified and inadequately insured to perform the procedures they are performing. We cannot sit back and allow patients of these procedures to entrust their safety to unlicensed cowboys profiting from the lack of regulation. It is time to call an end to this wild west free-for-all, and give patients in this industry, and the responsible operators, the protection they need and deserve.

To that end, I am delighted that the previous Government kick-started this process, first by banning cosmetic fillers for under-18s in England under the Botulinum Toxin and Cosmetic Fillers (Children) Act 2021. That was followed by the Health and Care Act 2022, which gave Ministers the power to tighten regulations by introducing a new licensing regime. The current Government are slowly and finally getting into gear on that scheme, but when do they expect to implement this protection as a matter of public safety? What steps will be taken to raise awareness of new regulations to improve public confidence in the non-surgical cosmetic sector as these measures are introduced?

Of the 27,462 procedures performed and recorded by the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons in 2024, approximately 93% were performed on women. Young women aged 18 to 25 years old also made up 48% of the 3,000 complaints to Save Face, a Government-approved register of medical aesthetic practitioners. That means that the Government’s failure to get on and implement regulations in this sector is disproportionately affecting a vulnerable group to a significant degree.

Furthermore, the governing voice in this area is social media, again, disproportionately placing the burden of risk on younger people. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh interviewed female Instagram users aged 18 to 30. All of them had undergone, or hoped to undergo, cosmetic surgery, and all of them looked to Instagram influencers for information about cosmetic procedures. With nine in 10 children owning a mobile phone by the time they reach 11, and 75% of eight to 17-year-olds having their own social media account, there is a real danger that our children and grandchildren could be exposed to cosmetic surgery at a young age, unaware of the risks of a cheap bodily enhancement.

Mental health struggles and body image challenges are unfortunately well documented, with almost 850,000 children accessing NHS mental health services in June 2025, and two in three children feeling negative or very negative about their body image, according to a survey commissioned by the Women and Equalities Committee from 2020. Social media, combined with heightened self-scrutiny on video calls since the pandemic, has sadly cast the way in which young people view themselves in an increasingly negative light. As such, the cosmetic surgery “boom”—as termed by the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, following a 102% rise in procedures in 2022—is alarming but unsurprising.

A failed procedure can have potentially life-threatening repercussions, and an unlicensed practitioner’s lack of training, skills and experience significantly increases the risk of failure. We owe it to the livelihoods of patients, who are predominantly young women, to improve the safety of non-surgical cosmetic procedures as much as we can. Governments are there not to stifle growth and innovation—the kind that creates jobs, rewards entrepreneurship and helps businesses to grow—but to protect the interests of British citizens in times of need. This is one of those times. The safety, and even the lives, of consumers are at risk if we do not act.

With that in mind, will the Government commit to swiftly implementing a licensing framework to combat such life-threatening risks? Furthermore, the problem in this area is precisely that unlicensed practitioners carrying out procedures are operating under the radar. How do the Government intend to support local authorities to actively and effectively enforce the licensing framework, to ensure that such practitioners are prevented from operating on patients in backroom shadows?

The number of complaints from patients with failed non-surgical cosmetic procedures shows no sign of plateauing. Again, I refer to the figures from Save Face, which received almost 3,000 complaints in 2022, 35% more than in 2020. Complaints about dermal fillers—treatments to add volume, typically to smooth out wrinkles or enhance facial definition—made up almost 70% of that figure.

As we debate this matter today, let us remember the enormity of the influence we are privileged to have. When they go wrong, cosmetic procedures can be life-changing for all the wrong reasons. I urge the Government to accelerate the licensing framework for non-surgical cosmetic procedures and treatments—therefore requiring practitioners to be licensed, qualified and insured—for the sake of public safety and the sake of saving lives.

Access to NHS Dentistry

Alison Griffiths Excerpts

Thursday 22nd May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Alison Griffiths (Bognor Regis and Littlehampton) (Con)]

It is an honour to speak in this debate and to raise the plight of my constituents, some of whom are struggling in silence, pain and frustration, simply trying to access basic NHS dental care. I thank the hon. Member for Great Grimsby and Cleethorpes (Melanie Onn) for securing the debate, and I share her views on pretty much everything she has said, but in particular the wider impact of poor dentistry on A&E, the NHS more widely and cardiac health.

I have many constituents’ testimony to refer to today. Let me begin with the real story of a person who has worked tirelessly her entire life. Now, due to long covid, she is housebound and dependent. When she missed a single NHS dental appointment due to illness, she was removed from the list. She has since been unable to find another NHS dentist. When an infection struck, she waited a week for emergency care at St Richard’s hospital, and she is not alone.

In 2023, only 24.7% of adults in the south-east were seen by an NHS dentist in the previous two years—the second-lowest rate in England. In some areas, fewer than one in five adults have been able to access NHS dentistry. The Government have announced recent steps, with 26,546 additional urgent care dental appointments for Sussex—a rise from 245 to 455 a week. We have a £20,000 golden hello relocation incentive to attract dentists to underserved areas. Some 17 of those posts have been approved for Sussex. I welcome those steps, but they are not enough.

The Dental Defence Union and the Public Accounts Committee have made it clear, as have other colleagues, that the NHS contract is broken. It disincentivises dentists from treating those patients with the greatest needs. In 2022, 91% of dentists surveyed felt worn out, and 84% reported burnout. They are walking away from NHS dentistry not out of disinterest, but because the system is unsustainable. How many of the urgent contracts are now available, and when will real contract reform take place?

NHS Performance: Darzi Investigation

Alison Griffiths Excerpts

Monday 7th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his intervention. Of course it is not just in Loughborough that we have a challenge with access to general practice; it is right across the country. I want to be clear, because GPs come in for a lot of criticism: primary care may be broken, and the front door to the NHS may be broken, but GPs did not break it. In fact, there are fewer GPs now than there were in 2015, yet they are providing more appointments. They have worked hard to improve the productivity of general practice, but they are under-resourced. That is why we are committed, as I told the Royal College of GPs just last week, to delivering the shift that we need out of hospitals and into the community—to growing primary care, including general practice, as a proportion of the NHS’s budget, so that we have the GPs needed to treat patients on time.

[Alison Griffiths (Bognor Regis and Littlehampton) (Con)]

Saturday was World Meningitis Day, but in the last year we have seen an almost doubling of meningitis cases in the UK. Does the Secretary of State think that the meningitis vaccination take-up rate is where it should be?

[Wes Streeting]

I am grateful to the hon. Member for her question. No, I do not think that the take-up rate is where it should be. That is why in the short time we have been in office we have put more effort and energy into vaccine take-up, but there is more to do. I welcome her to the House, and will not have a go at her for the record of the people who sat on the Government Benches just before the general election.