Meeting of the Parliament 17 March 2026 [Draft]
I will press amendment 11. The bill will create a situation whereby practitioners who spend more than a year completing advanced aesthetics training will not be able to operate independently. That will mean that women such as my constituent and many others, as non-healthcare practitioners, would need to rely on a prescribing medic in order to operate and supervise a clinic. That is even if a provider could be found, which remains to be seen, and the costs may well be prohibitive.
The bill creates a model in which experienced practitioners will become dependent on prescribers who have no financial stake in their business while potentially offering the same treatments themselves. In practice, that means that a qualified practitioner could spend years building a compliant clinic, only to find that their ability to continue operating depends entirely on securing and retaining a prescriber, who may also be a competitor in the same market. That market—the treatments and the demand for them, in particular from young women—is growing, and in my opinion it will only continue to grow as a result of changing beauty standards that are heavily promoted on social media.
I think that there is a lack of understanding by the Government of those drivers, in particular for the consumers in the industry. I hope that the Government understands, and can see, that those from a lower socioeconomic background will not be able to afford the treatment prices, which will inevitably be driven up if all or many of the non-medical providers in the market are forced to close. It will then inevitably push those consumers into an underground and unregulated sector, which may then lead to an increase in adverse treatment effects. The bill may, through unintended consequences, force out responsible and highly trained women-led businesses and lead, unfortunately, to more women consumers getting treatment from unregulated and unsafe providers.
I ask members to support my amendments, and I ask the Government to think carefully about the issue, the predicament of women such as my constituent and the unintended consequences.