Since 2023, we have been campaigning for the Government to ban anyone who is not a GMC‑registered plastic surgeon from carrying out high‑risk procedures such as blepharoplasties, liquid BBLs and facelifts. At present, it is still not illegal for practitioners who are not on the GMC specialist register to perform these extremely high‑risk, invasive surgical procedures.
For over a year, we have been working with Channel 5 News to expose laypeople exploiting this loophole and offering surgical cosmetic interventions in office blocks and living rooms. Our latest investigation uncovered two women operating from a rented office in London and offering blepharoplasties.
These investigations underline the urgent need for new legislation to stop unqualified “cowboys” from picking up a scalpel and operating on patients. Without clear legal restrictions and meaningful penalties, these individuals are effectively free to experiment on people’s faces and bodies with little or no accountability, leaving patients at risk of disfigurement, life‑changing harm or even death. We need a law that closes this loophole, makes it unequivocally illegal for laypeople to perform such procedures, and ensures that only properly trained specialist surgeons are permitted to carry out these high‑risk operations.
