Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to ensure that cosmetic surgery clinics provide a safe standard of care.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator of health and adult social care providers, including cosmetic surgery clinics, in England and has a key responsibility in the overall assurance of safety and quality of health and adult social care services.

All providers of regulated activities must be registered and follow the set of fundamental standards of safety and quality. The fundamental standards describe the basic requirements that providers should always meet, and outline the outcomes that service users should always expect.

The CQC regulates and assesses all providers of regulated activities by looking at five domains – whether they are safe, effective, caring, responsive to people’s needs and well-led.

Where the CQC finds cosmetic surgery services are providing substandard care, a range of enforcement powers have been and will continue where necessary to be used against these services. The CQC has a wide range of enforcement powers. These powers include but are not limited to immediate closure of a service, suspending a service, issuing Warning Notices and prosecuting providers.