Crisis in NHS dentistry down to workforce planning failure - Keir Mather

It has been documented that our country is now plagued with dental deserts. According to a report published last year by the Association of Dental Groups, only a third of adults and less than half of English children have access to an NHS dentist. Some 90 per cent of dental practices no longer accept NHS patients, leaving four million people without access to NHS dental care.

In Selby and Ainsty, we have been left with just nine dental practices offering NHS services; we have just nine for a vast rural constituency that stretches from Doncaster in the south to Harrogate in the north, and suffers fundamentally with issues such as a lack of public transport in our rural areas - it is simply not good enough.

We did not get into this situation overnight; we have had 13 years - almost 14 now - of mismanagement by the Conservative party, which has shown a complete dereliction of its duty to protect the health of the British people. The Government’s chronic underfunding of dental practices, with funding cut by a third in the past decade, has meant that patients are being failed on an unprecedented scale.

The Government has been quick to blame the dental contract, as well as the Covid-19 pandemic, for the crisis that dentistry faces, but the Government has had 13 years to revise that contract, stabilise dentistry and make it fit for the future. Instead, they have chosen to rest on their laurels and have pursued muddled plans, allowing dentistry to crumble.

The crisis in our dental system can be traced back to one fundamental cause: challenges to our workforce. Over the past decade, there has been a complete failure to forward plan about the workforce needs of our dentistry system in the future.

We must be aware that any hope of recovery must be catalysed and underpinned by a comprehensive workforce plan that sets the NHS and dentistry up for a long-term, stable and productive future that serves the citizens of our country.

It was Labour’s plan 75 years ago that brought NHS dentistry into existence and it will be Labour’s plan that will save NHS dentistry from the perilous position that the Conservative party has created. Our plan will give patients the care they need and deserve. Our plan will fund 700,000 more urgent appointments, for things such as fillings and root canals. We will incentivise new dentists to work in areas with the greatest need. We will implement supervised toothbrushing in schools, so we can directly tackle these issues at source, and in the long run we will reform the dental contract so that we can rebuild the service.

An abridged version of a speech by Keir Mather, Labour MP for Selby and Ainsty, during a debate in the House of Commons on NHS dentistry.