Eating Disorders Awareness Week

Olly Glover Excerpts

Thursday 26th February 2026 Westminster Hall

[Olly Glover (Didcot and Wantage) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Vaz. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) for introducing the debate and for her enormous dedication and hard work on this vital issue over many years.

I would like to talk about the themes that have arisen from constituency cases that my team and I have encountered and supported. The key concern is not the clinical aspects of care but the delay and fragmentation of the ownership of care. Life-threatening conditions can drift. Gaining access to care, support and treatment often involves a Kafkaesque labyrinth of dysfunctional process and procedure, and referrals and re-referrals between a range of teams in the complicated organisation that the NHS is. We need independent specialist assessments, safe interim arrangements, and timely and accountable co-ordination of care.

Some people wait more than eight months for an answer either way regarding whether they are eligible for treatment under the current criteria. That can further compromise their confidence in coming forward and asking for support. It can have a huge personal cost, impacting people’s ability to drive or work, reducing life expectancy and creating long-term medical complications, which add to wider pressures on the NHS. As in other debates that we have about healthcare in this country, this issue highlights an area where, if we get the start of the process right with early, preventive interventions, we will be able to help individuals and alleviate some of the pressure on critical care services.

[Wera Hobhouse]

It is worth mentioning again that if a person with an eating disorder does not get treatment, it takes them three times as long as they have been suffering to recover. If they have suffered from an eating disorder for three years, it takes them nine years to fully recover. We know from other health services that early intervention is key, but it is particularly important for eating disorders because the longer they are left, the much longer the recovery process is. Some people never recover and it is a life sentence.

[Olly Glover]

My hon. Friend again shows her wealth of knowledge and experience of this topic. Some of the cases that my team and I have supported have involved people who have been living with eating disorders for decades. I have also seen cases where the transition from support services for children and young people into those for adults has been managed badly. That is not unique to eating disorders; it is a wider issue in mental health provision.

As we have heard, eating disorders can have a devastating impact. They rob people of years of life, wipe out adolescence, remove educational and social opportunities, and leave many isolated and unable to cope. Eating disorders are one of the deadliest mental health conditions and constitute a significant health crisis. Cases of eating disorders have surged, with hospital admissions doubling in a decade. It is a huge concern, in the face of that crisis, that eating disorder services are being cut in much of the country. Over half of the country’s integrated care boards have cut real-terms spending on children’s eating disorder services in the last financial year.

I am proud of the leadership that parliamentarians such as my hon. Friend the Member for Bath and Baroness Parminter in the other place have shown on this issue, including working with campaign groups such as Dump the Scales. The scandal of people being told that they are “not thin enough” for medical help must end. Far too many people cannot access the services they need.

I welcome recent guidance from NHS England on how to design eating disorder services to support children and young people better, but we need to do more than tinker around the edges with updated guidance. We need a meaningful national strategy to transform these services, with more specialist support, and we need to build a culture across the health service and beyond that recognises the complexities of eating disorders and the terrible dangers they pose.

Lending urgency to that is the fact that the target of 95% of urgent cases receiving treatment within a week, and routine cases receiving it within four weeks, is routinely being missed. From September to November last year, only 78% of urgent referrals and 82% of routine referrals started treatment within the target timeframe. That is why I am very happy to support a wider Liberal Democrat campaign for investment in community health services and prevention, including better specialist support for people with eating disorders. As we heard from my hon. Friend, early intervention can greatly reduce the number of people who are suffering.

We are also campaigning for regular mental health check-ups—the concept of a mental health MOT—at key points in people’s lives when they are most vulnerable to mental ill health. Like others who have spoken, I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response. So many people are suffering, and lots of people are trying to help—that is not the issue. We need to make the overall system work much better, with all its different component parts working towards the goal of supporting people.