Government's £50m fund to tackle dental appointment backlog 'virtually unusable', Bradford MP Judith Cummins warns

Bradford South MP Judith Cummins told a Westminster Hall debate on Thursday that a Government scheme announced last month to help provide more dental appointments is effectively “unworkable”.

She said the owner of a dental practice in her constituency had told her the rules regarding accessing the money involve “either persuading an already overstretched workforce to work overtime or recruiting new staff or hiring expensive locums - all of which has to be delivered by March 2022”.

In January, NHS England announced £50m would be made available to secure up to 350,000 additional dental appointments “allowing people suffering from oral pain, disease, and infection to get the care they need”.

As part of the funding allocation, the Yorkshire and Humber region is to receive £8.6m. Dental practices are currently being ordered to operate at 85 per cent of their pre-pandemic contracted activity.

But Ms Cummins said there are major question marks over the effectiveness of the scheme with Bupa raising similar concerns to the local dental practice owner.

“To qualify for the funds, dentists must first have met their NHS contract thresholds, a system that excludes practices that have dealt with large numbers of patients with urgent needs, or faced higher staff and patient sickness, or who have struggled to recruit staff who are prepared to do NHS work,” she said

“Only 134 of Bupa’s 306 practices were eligible under the criteria. Of those 134, only two so far have felt able to take up the extra funding.”

She added: “It is clear that this funding package is not new funding - it is drawn from the £169 million that was clawed back from contract holders in 2020/21 for not meeting contractual targets.

“In my view, clawback is a failure of the system.

“It is not a failure of the NHS to spend money allocated through budgets but a failure to properly target resources to where they are needed, such as in my constituency in Bradford South and in the district of Bradford.

“The Government should not expect applause for creating a pot of funding for urgent care that simply cannot be spent in the time allocated, or in the areas where it is needed most, because of the strings that have been attached.”

She said the current funding commitments are not sufficient, with the British Dental Association estimating it would take £880m a year just to restore NHS dental budgets back to 2010 levels.

Ms Cummins added: “Chronic underfunding and the current contract are to blame for the long-standing problems with burnout, recruitment and retention in NHS dental services, with almost a thousand dentists leaving the NHS in England in the last financial year.”

Health Minister Maria Caulfield insisted there has been “good uptake” of the new £50m fund to ease dental backlogs.

“We know that it will cover the period to the end of this financial year to buy some urgent capacity for the system and to help deliver more than 300,000 appointments that currently cannot happen.

“Regions across the country are signing up and because the payments to dentists are much better than under the current contract, there is an appetite among dentists.

“That shows if we remunerate dentists adequately they have an interest in taking on NHS work.”

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