NHS Dentistry

I beg to move, That this House is concerned about NHS dentistry; notes that over a quarter of a million people have signed a petition calling for urgent action to save NHS dentistry and make it fit for the 21st century; regrets that nearly 14 million people were unable to access NHS dentistry in England in 2025; welcomes the Government’s commitment to both tackle and rebuild dentistry for the long term; and calls on the Government to set out a clear timetable for the fundamental reform of the NHS dental contract, and to improve retention of NHS dentists and access for patients across the country.

Around 14 million people, or one in four people, were unable to access NHS dental care in early 2025. Some 56% of children in Somerset did not see an NHS dentist in 2025. We are all seeing scenes that we would expect to read about in a Charles Dickens novel, not read about in the news, hear about from friends, or, if you are an MP, hear about almost every day from constituents. I have heard from 15 parents directly who have recently taken their children to hospital with dental issues. One local told me that her 86-year old father was in so much pain that he pulled out his own teeth because he could not get dental treatment. I have heard from a military family and a pregnant woman who could not find NHS dental treatment. To highlight the scale of the problem, a local dental practice told me that every day, it takes in at the very least 10 to 15 unplanned emergencies, compared to two or three a few years ago.

The situation has got so bad that some locals are telling me that it is cheaper, sometimes by hundreds of pounds, to fly to Spain to get dental treatment—and a tan, of course. One couple who lived in Thailand for a while even told me that when they came back to the UK, they worked out that it was easier and cheaper to stay registered in Thailand, and to go back there to get dental treatment. I mean, that is just insane! Over 93% of respondents to a survey of locals that I carried out recently were dissatisfied with the availability of NHS dentistry, and 69% of parents I surveyed said that getting an NHS dental appointment was either very difficult or impossible. It would be easier to pull teeth.

Like many Members of this House, since being elected, I have been doing all I can to fix the issue. Luckily, we have had some real successes. After finding underspend in dentistry budgets in Somerset, I worked with our local NHS to open new dentists in Crewkerne and Chard. As a result, and with the new practice in Wellington, NHS dentistry has been brought to 20,000 extra people in Somerset, which is good news. However, the underused dentistry budget has fallen by 91% across the country. That means that there is not enough money to open new NHS dentist practices through underspend, which is a real problem, as we need NHS dentists in Yeovil, Ilminster and the rest of my constituency. It is not as if the workforce was not there. While the number of dentists registering to provide care in the UK has gone up to around 47,000, we are seeing the number of NHS dentists fall. Only around 25,000 dentists are doing some work for the NHS.

I was interested to hear about the hon. Member’s local survey. Ahead of the general election, around 65% of respondents to my survey in Filton and Bradley Stoke reported that the reason why they do not have an NHS dentist is that theirs went private. Does he agree that it would be helpful if the Minister could provide an update on the incentives for keeping more dentists in the NHS?

I agree with the hon. Member, and I will come on to that issue later. During covid, people missed appointments, and then got completely taken off the dental list.

One local working in dentistry summed it up perfectly when they told me that, “NHS dentistry is in terminal decline.”

Patients have had to either go private or go without a dentist. Just before the general election, I had a £1,600 bill for a root canal filling that needed to be redone. I was fortunate, in that I could afford that, but many people would have had to have the tooth ripped out. In a cost of living crisis, this is more than a problem. In my public survey, 87% of respondents rated private dentistry as unaffordable.

To be fair, the Government have made a good start by providing 100,000 urgent dental appointments. That is great, but the target is 700,000. I find it worrying that the Government seem to have quietly dropped their promise to deliver 700,000 more dental appointments by broadening the definition of “urgent” dental appointments for clinical reasons.

I commend the hon. Gentleman for bringing forward this debate, in which all of us across the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland have an interest. The Government committed themselves to increasing dental training places by 40%, but the fact is that after three years of training, those who have trained seem to go elsewhere for better money. Does he agree that training more dentists without addressing the reasons why dentists are leaving the NHS is like trying to fix a leaky bucket? It is time for the Government and the Minister to take on and sort out this issue.

I totally agree with the hon. Member, and I will come on to that point later. I hope the Minister can clarify my point about broadening the definition of “urgent” dental appointments for clinical reasons, and I am happy to give way if he wants to do so now.

indicated dissent.

I will move on, but if the Minister could remember to address that question later, it would be most helpful. On urgent care, we Liberal Democrats would go further by introducing a £750 million dental rescue plan and flexible commissioning, which would guarantee an NHS dentist for everyone needing urgent and emergency care.

I welcome the Government’s work on prevention, and particularly the support for supervised toothbrushing. I have raised this with the Minister before, but schools in my area rightly pointed out that when all the tasks that teaching staff have to do are factored in, sometimes getting the toothbrushing scheme in place is not possible. Schools in my area have had their own ways of promoting good oral health, but I also understand the drive to support and manage this nationally, so will the Minister meet me to hear from schools in my area, and talk about what we can do to support them without adding more burdens?

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, my near neighbour, for bringing forward this motion. He will agree that this is an issue that seems to fall hardest—disproportionately so—on rural areas. Does he also agree that Governments of both hues have tried a number of gimmicks and initiatives, but the core of the issue is to try to make NHS dentistry more attractive, and the best way to do that—please forgive the pun—is a root and branch reform of the contract to ensure that it pays? It is not rocket science; it is quite easy to do.

I totally agree with the hon. Gentleman, my constituency neighbour. I will come on to contracting later, but he is completely right on that point. Dentists in my area are asking why there is no funding for them to do school visits, as they would be happy to come in and support. We also need to look more broadly at the way we inform families.

What makes people in Yeovil really angry, however, is that we have all known for years what is wrong. We have an underfunded system with an NHS dental contract from 2006 that just does not work—100% of respondents I surveyed from dental practices in Yeovil said that the contract is not fit for purpose. Just about everyone agrees with that, as we have heard today. The biggest issue is units of activity, which are like tokens that the NHS gives to local dentists to use each year. The system basically sets quotas on the number of patients a dentist can see on the NHS. If they go over that quota, dentists are not paid and will have to cover the cost of material, lab work and other overheads.

One of the biggest problems with the system is that it underpays for treating patients with complex and high needs. The Government’s recent changes are a welcome first step, with new care packages for patients with very high needs, and higher rates. NHS Somerset is doing all it can and has increased units of activity by 10,000 from 2025-26.

I have met with my local dentists. Does the hon. Member agree that part of the problem is the massive differential in the price per unit that each dental practice is paid? It means that for some dental practices it is no longer viable to continue to do NHS dentistry, whereas for others, based on the legacy price per unit they get, it remains competitive.

I completely agree with the hon. Member on that point. We have seen that in my constituency and others in Somerset: one place will be on a higher rate, and another place will be on less. Ultimately, we need to get rid of that system if we want more NHS dentists, and look at alternatives, such as the weighted model suggested by the Health and Social Care Committee.

But that is not all. One of the frustrating things that I found when we were setting up a new NHS dentist in my area is that dentists cannot prioritise locals. The dental contract means that people do not register with a dentist as they do a GP; they can attend any dental practice that is taking NHS patients, even if the practice is based miles away. That is because, technically, people are only with a dentist for as long as a course of treatment, which means that if someone lives in Yeovil, Crewkerne or Chard—or in the rest of my constituency—they do not have the right to be permanently registered with their local NHS dental practice.

When we got the new practices open, there was no guarantee that locals who needed a dentist most would get one. That is madness. We had people travelling 200 or 300 miles to come to one of our new dental practices, and someone a mile down the road could not sign up. What is the point of opening a new dental practice in our area if it does not benefit all—or even half—of the people there? That part of the contract also means that to stay with their NHS dentist, someone needs to have six to 12-monthly appointments to keep their spot. That meant that a lot of people lost spots during covid. Local providers, the NHS and I are doing our best locally, but there is only so much we can do within those rules. I urge the Minister to make reintroducing permanent patient registration rights a priority in contract reforms.

Even then, without proper funding such changes will not work. Since 2010, the amount of the NHS budget spent on dentistry has more than halved. Integrated care boards, which oversee local NHS services, have also been making serious budget cuts, with 50% of their staff having to be made redundant. That has left us in a situation where we invest less of our health budget in dentistry than any of our European neighbours, according to data from the OECD. At the same time, dental practices in Yeovil tell me that the cost of materials, energy and labour have gone through the roof, while missed appointments or last minute cancellations are costing practices a fortune. We need the Minister to set out how the Government plan to fund NHS dentistry properly. Will he also set out what steps he is taking to support dentists with day to day costs, particularly in relation to resourcing and cancellations?

There is one other big issue that we have to address: getting dentists to work and stay in rural areas such as Somerset. Mark, who is about to retire after 39 years as a dentist in Yeovil—thank you for your hard work, Mark—has been saying to policymakers and the press since the mid-1990s that we would end up in exactly this situation if we did not attract dentists to places like south Somerset, which lose out because NHS dentistry tends to be concentrated around dental training schools and urban centres. It is therefore a good start that the Government will require younger dentists to work in the NHS after graduation for around three years, but that is only a short term fix, just like the golden hello bonus—another one off fix. We need to write proper workforce planning for health and social care into law, including projections for dentists and dental staff.

Similarly, the Government’s recent announcement of 50 new dental school places from 2027 is great, but that is a rise of only 6%—a drop of water in the dental Sahara desert that is the south west. I think it is fair to say that dentists trained in Portsmouth will probably stay around there and instead of coming to fill demand in Somerset, which is a real tragedy because as a community we have so much to offer. I invite the Minister to come to Somerset to talk with us about how we can get that across to dentists.

Ultimately, we need fundamental changes to the NHS contract, how we fund it and how we recruit. Of the local dentists I surveyed, 100% said that they were not satisfied with the Government’s progress on improving the NHS dental contract, while 82% of the public I surveyed rated the Government’s performance on NHS dentistry as poor or very poor. Two years into this Government, we are still waiting for proper changes to the NHS dental contract; if we factor in early discussions, consultations and then actually drafting and proposing the thing—we all know how long those things take—I am sure the Minister is aware that if this is kicked down the road any further, the Government will not be able to deliver on their promise to roll out a new NHS dental system by the next election.

I urge the Minister to provide a clear commitment to getting the consultation on fundamental reforms done this summer, no matter how distracting a new Secretary of State, a by election and a change of Prime Minister may be—let us get on with it. I hope the Minister will also use this debate as an opportunity to go further and provide a clear timetable for when formal negotiations will start, as well as a firm deadline for rolling out the new system in this Parliament. I know that the Minister is committed to getting this right, and that he is working with a difficult brief, but there seems to be a disappointing trend emerging with this Government, whether in social care, defence, investment or dentistry: if it is hard, kick it down the road.

We were promised change, so please work with us to deliver that. I do not want to have to be back here in a year or two, reporting that things have got even worse in Yeovil.

I broadly agree with the hon. Gentleman’s list of demands. I wonder whether he could offer advice, based on the Liberal Democrats’ five years in government, on lessons learned about the NHS contract and its reform.

There is always a dig like that from the Labour Benches. Look, that was back in 2010. I was 18 at the time—I turned 34 on Saturday. Things have changed. The hon. Gentleman’s Government is in power now, and they are making a bit of a mess of a few things at the moment. This is something they could be really proud of; they could deliver change for the people of this country who voted for them. Get out there, make change and get their teeth sorted.

I am proud to speak in this debate. I declare that I co chair the all parliamentary group on dentistry and oral health.

I have been working on this issue for the best part of a decade, raising it with Ministers in the previous Government, and I have to say that the scale of the challenge that this Government inherited is nothing short of a national scandal. I welcome the steps that the Government have taken: the 700,000 additional urgent appointments; the broadening of that definition in February; and the 1.8 million extra treatments delivered in just seven months. These are real achievements, and I pay tribute to the Minister, whom I have always found to be accessible. He and I have had a number of discussions, and I know that he is not just sympathetic to the issue, but very keen to resolve it. However, as he knows, although these steps are welcome, they are just a sticking plaster on a wound that runs very deep.

Almost 14 million people in this country could not access NHS dental care in early 2025—that is more than one in four adults in England, and more than three times as many as before the pandemic. These are not statistics; they are people in pain, people who cannot eat properly and people who are even embarrassed to smile. The British Dental Association’s research tells us that 41% of adults now have tooth decay—levels that have not been seen since the 1990s, undoing decades of hard won progress in oral health. Polling from Ipsos makes for truly shocking reading: people across this country who cannot get an NHS appointment have been forced to pull their own teeth out. In one of the wealthiest nations in the world, that is just not acceptable.

How did we get here? Since 2010, the proportion of the NHS budget spent on dentistry has more than halved, from 3.3% to just 1.5%. That is the direct result of 14 years of the previous Government—£1 billion gone, and patient charges hiked by over two thirds. In 2023, the Health and Social Care Committee branded the dental contract “not fit for purpose”; both the Public Accounts Committee and the Nuffield Trust have said the same. Yet the previous Government for 14 years did nothing about it.

After the Tory Government recovery plan was found by the National Audit Office to be off track, this Government have tried to change things. The new patient premium cost £88 million, but produced no measurable improvement in access. Just last week, we learned that despite the offer of a £20,000 golden hello, just two dentists in Greater Manchester signed up to do NHS work. That tells us how broken our system is.

I want to raise a specific injustice that was brought to my attention by the Epilepsy Society. Around 630,000 people in this country have epilepsy. A third have uncontrolled seizures and fall without warning, often face first, breaking their teeth again and again. Harriet, who is 29 years old, has six missing teeth, including her front teeth—top and bottom. After she broke her NHS dentures three times in a single year, her dentist has refused to issue another set. She can barely speak clearly, she struggles to eat, and every time a seizure strikes she faces a new bill for the damage she could not possibly prevent. A broken arm caused by a seizure is treated free in hospital; a broken tooth caused by that same seizure incurs significant expenditure. There is no medical exemption for epilepsy related dental damage, but there should be. I urge the Minister to look specifically at that in the short term before going on to the full dental contract.

What is the cost of fixing it, and why do we need it? The British Dental Association estimated that it would take about £1.5 billion a year to restore NHS dentistry to a universal service. When the Chancellor announced £29 billion for the NHS in her statement on the spending review, I asked her whether any of that money could be set aside for dentistry. Sadly, it has not been, and no additional money has been set out for dentistry.

Catching decay early is far cheaper than an emergency treatment, prevention in children costs a fraction of what we spend fixing the damage in adults and a workforce who stay in the NHS are definitely cheaper than one who walk away. We need a new contract that breaks decisively with units of dental activity, prioritises prevention and makes NHS dentistry a place where talented professionals want to build their careers. The Government have announced a public consultation for this summer, which is great news, but we need a timetable and a firm deadline for a new system in this Parliament. We cannot kick this into the long grass again—13 years of that was quite enough.

As I said, I have been raising these issues for years. I sat in rooms with Ministers and heard warm words but found nothing changed. I do believe that this Government are different and that the Minister is serious—I have had many discussions with him, and he has met the all party parliamentary group on dentistry and oral health a number of times—but that seriousness must be matched with urgency, and that urgency must be matched with investment. The people of Bolton South and Walkden and people across the country deserve to see a dentist without waiting years and without pulling their own teeth. They deserve a Government who will finally fix NHS dentistry. I urge the Minister to please urge the Chancellor and the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care to give it the utmost priority. Let us resolve it once and for all.

The Government were elected on a platform that included a dentistry rescue plan. They correctly assessed a crisis in NHS dentistry and promised to fix it. Nowhere is that crisis more felt than in the rural areas across the country.

Nearly two years on from the general election, I consulted residents across my constituency in a survey about the health care issues that mattered to them. Almost everyone who replied mentioned the state of NHS dentistry and the lack of provision across Somerset. If the Government want to show genuine support for rural communities, as they claim, they can no longer ignore those voices calling for action—but ignore them, the Minister does.

When I asked the Minister on the Floor of this House what steps he was taking to increase the number of dentists accessible to rural communities, he directed me to, “Watch my post box” to be furnished with the numbers of how many more appointments have been provided in my constituency. I did wait, and then I waited some more, and no response came. Eventually, having chased the special adviser outside the Chamber and threatened a point of order for the Minister’s reply, I did get a response. It then became clear why his Department had been so reticent: the numbers revealed that 4% fewer NHS dental treatments had been delivered in the first seven months of this financial year compared with the same period before the general election.

The Government are too busy patting themselves on the back to notice the dire reality of NHS dental provision across Somerset and other rural counties. For meaningful change to be felt by my constituents and patients across the country, reform of the system needs to start being treated as a priority. Access to quality NHS dental care should be available to all, not just those in urban Labour constituencies.

Families in Somerset should not need to travel miles for basic care, paying fees they cannot afford or, worse still, going without treatment altogether. Polling for Ipsos last year revealed that when people cannot secure dental treatment, a quarter will resort to at home DIY solutions. That is simply not acceptable in a modern health service.

Before those on the Government Benches leap to their feet with interventions beginning with “Fourteen years”, which we hear every sitting day, I have to acknowledge that this problem did not start in July 2024. Previous Governments, including previous Conservative Governments, did not do enough to fix the problem. The last Government did take steps, including an uprating of NHS dental unit pricing, but far more needs to be done to address the deeper structural issues in the system. Contract reform, fundamentally, is what we need to see.

I am encouraged that Ministers seem to agree, but on this issue, this Government’s intervention follows a familiar pattern. Instead of taking action, they are launching a consultation. This Government and this Minister have been in office for two years, and I would have thought that by now they would have worked out what they wanted to do to improve the system. If the Minister is going to consult, I very much hope that it is on the basis of a well thought through plan and that it is not being used as another delaying tactic. I hope, in particular, that he will consider how we can strengthen the dental workforce in rural areas.

Something I have raised previously with the Minister is how we can train more dentists locally. Clinicians who train in a community are more likely to stay and practise there. In Bridgwater, discussions took place with Bridgwater and Taunton college on the potential for partnerships, such as with the University of Bristol dental hospital, to deliver local training pathways. If student dentists could do some of their practice within rural communities, it might encourage them to work there afterwards. The Minister asked me to write to him about that, and I did, but I got a whole load of platitudes back and, regrettably, no action was taken.

Does the hon. Member agree that the national golden hello scheme to attract and retain NHS dentists is just not working? Only four of 19 posts in Devon have been filled, and the Fresh Dental practice in Dartmouth will end the provision of NHS dental services at the end of June. It will no longer provide NHS care and is the last dentist in the town. It says that it has tried to recruit for years but cannot fill the positions. It says: “It has become increasingly difficult to maintain the NHS contract in a sustainable way.”

I thank the hon. Lady for her point. I think golden hellos are a useful tool, but they are not sufficient. Reform of the contract is fundamentally what we need, and one would hope that after two years in his place, the Minister would have developed an idea of what to take forward. I believe that these local partnerships are exactly the sort of solution that could make a real difference to areas such as Bridgwater.

More broadly, the Government must ensure that NHS dentistry is a viable and attractive career. This means continuing to look at how procedures are valued, at whether payments properly reflect the work involved and at how we can encourage dentists not just to enter the NHS but to remain in it. This House has already identified the problem and we have talked about reform, but now we need to deliver results to those in need. My residents across the Bridgwater constituency do not want another consultation that drags on for months without anything changing. They want an appointment with a dentist, and I urge the Minister to do all he can to deliver upon that as quickly as possible.

With an immediate four minute time limit, I call Alison Hume.

Imagine being 81 years old, blind and waking up with a terrible toothache, and then imagine having no car and no local dentist to turn to. This was the reality for John, one of my constituents in Scarborough and Whitby. His story is unfolding at a time when we are seeing a much needed and welcome shift in how our country tackles dental care. After years of the system being left to decay, we are finally seeing real funding, new incentives to recruit dentists and a genuine, sincere effort to rescue NHS dentistry. Last year, this Labour Government invested around £3.7 billion on primary care dentistry. We are starting to make a real difference to people’s lives. Take another of my constituents, Margaret. She was so grateful for the recent changes that she sat down and wrote a letter to the Minister for Care. After suffering from a debilitating toothache, which had threatened to leave her housebound, the Government’s new emergency appointments meant that she could get her tooth extracted at short notice.

The true test of our reforms is whether they reach everyone, and Margaret’s story shows that they have not. The reason that Margaret needed that emergency help was that her regular NHS dentist went private. Last week, I called 13 dental practices in my constituency. Only one, in Whitby, is taking on adults on the NHS, but only those with a Whitby postcode, and no dental practice in Scarborough is taking on adults under the NHS. Because John could not find an NHS dentist in Scarborough, he had to go private for an emergency extraction and was hit with a £280 bill. That is not just an exorbitant fee; it is a breaking point. If someone is blind and cannot drive, an emergency appointment in a nearby town is not much use.

We cannot judge success on national averages while people in coastal communities such as Scarborough and Whitby feel stranded. In Scarborough, we have seen practice after practice going 100% private and handing back their NHS contracts. Two constituents who moved to Scarborough were appalled to find that not a single dental practice was taking NHS patients.

My hon. Friend and I know that our constituencies are somewhat similar. My Carlisle constituents currently have to travel 12 miles to find a dental practice that is taking patients. That is an improvement: last year they had to go to Yorkshire to find an NHS practice that was taking on new patients. Does she agree that the steps this Government are taking to rebuild NHS dentistry need to be focused on our rural and coastal communities, such as our two constituencies?

My hon. Friend is right, and I hope that the Minister addresses the challenges faced by rural and coastal communities in his closing remarks.

The two constituents I mentioned were told that they could be put on a waiting list. Unfortunately, the waiting lists were 10 years long; aged 80 and 77, they did not think it was likely that they would even get to the top.

My Scarborough and Whitby constituency is a dental desert. I worry about any constituent not having access to an NHS dentist, but I worry particularly about those with disabilities, like John. Because people can attend any dental practice, and dental practices can choose who to deliver care to, integrated care boards cannot decide who dentists see under their core contract. That makes it difficult for ICBs to target access at particular patient groups.

The Minister has worked tirelessly to deliver on our manifesto commitments, and further improvements are coming. I applaud the progress made so far, but I ask my hon. Friend, on behalf of my constituents: what specific targeted action is being taken to address the complete lack of access to NHS dentistry in coastal towns such as Scarborough? What about people such as John and others who have disabilities but do not receive the benefits that passport them to free NHS care? We have made huge progress in getting children access to NHS dentistry. Is it not time to target access at patients with disabilities?

Almost half of children in Cambridgeshire have not seen a dentist in the last 12 months. That will have many impacts that we can only imagine, but one of them is that one in every eight children in East Cambridgeshire have tooth decay by the time they are five. That should be utterly unacceptable to us all. In short, Ely and East Cambridgeshire is an NHS dental desert.

We have heard Labour Members make valiant attempts to blame almost anybody else for this situation, but it was a Labour Government who introduced the new dentist contract in 2006, despite lots of people warning that it would lead to dentists leaving the NHS. Indeed, that is exactly what we have seen: they have left in droves.

In Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, we have a vacancy rate for NHS general dentists of 24%—almost one in four. Even more frustratingly, I have heard from dentists locally who are willing and able to take on more NHS patients, and have contacted the ICB and asked for the funding to do so, but have been refused that funding. I have constituents who cannot get an NHS dentist appointment, and I have dentists who are willing to give them an NHS dentist appointment, but nobody seems willing to give them the money so that that can happen.

The hon. Member is making an excellent point, and I suspect that the ICB in that situation is finding that its budget is overstretched. On that basis, and in the spirit of not being partisan, would she welcome the investment that this Government are putting into the NHS, which the Liberal Democrats oppose?

I welcome investment in NHS dentistry, but it is all just playing around at the edges unless and until we change that contract, because it is the contract that is at fault. I understand the Minister said that he would consult on that in the summer. We are already part way through June. Can we please have a date for the consultation, and a commitment to implement changes to the contract so that it is more attractive and we can get dentists back into the NHS? Can we also have a commitment to when we will have a workforce plan for dentistry, so that one in four NHS dentist roles in my area are no longer vacant?

I thank the hon. Members for Yeovil (Adam Dance), for Waveney Valley (Adrian Ramsay) and for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford), and my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland Central (Lewis Atkinson), for giving us this opportunity to discuss dentistry.

This situation of access to dentistry is not new. From 2007 to 2014, I managed the Braunstone health and social care centre in the constituency of my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall). The centre was designed to bring NHS organisations together, with space for a dentist and an optician. However, we were unsuccessful at attracting NHS dentists and opticians to work in the centre, so those spaces were repurposed for other NHS services.

Flash forward to today: I have been working with Fiona Ellwood, a constituent and associate professor and director of dental education at the University of Lincoln, on how we tackle the NHS dentistry issue head on. Fiona and I have been working together on a proposal to utilise the workforce we already have, which I shared with the Minister a few weeks ago; we would welcome a meeting with him to discuss this further.

As of last month, there were just shy of 70,000 dental nurses and around 47,000 dentists in the UK, which I am pleased to see represents a workforce expansion of over 5% under this Government. However, despite seven distinct professional groups making up the dental team, dentists remain overstretched because patients are funnelled to them for almost everything—even cases that trained dental nurses, dental hygienists or dental therapists could safely handle. NHS data confirms that dental therapists and hygienists deliver just 5% of total service activity. That baseline has stagnated for years, trapping dentists under a mountain of work when the entire workforce, if utilised, could make systematic improvements to dental care. Just imagine the appointments that could be released if we just used the current workforce in a different way.

The current situation is inefficient and expensive and is driving dentists out of the NHS, while 13 million people across the country are left with a completely unmet need for NHS dentistry. My constituency of North West Leicestershire already has the second lowest rate for units of dental activity in Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland. There were 14 contract terminations between February 2021 and July 2024, and one practice was terminated in Ashby in my constituency. We do not have a lack of talent; we have a failure of deployment. Dental therapists can do over 70% of routine primary care. Why do we not use the service that we have? We could realise clear benefits if the whole dentistry workforce was utilised according to skills and experience, rather than according to what a dentist can or cannot do.

Dental nurses also have the greatest capacity to take on intervention and preventive work, and to work with flexibility and agility within community and neighbourhood settings. Many are already oral health practitioners in their own right. I am greatly pleased that a training centre in Lincolnshire offering courses in dental hygiene and therapy will open in 2026, accepting around 30 students in its first year. It will teach a new BSC in dental hygiene and therapy alongside a foundational course designed to help dental nurses and other healthcare professionals retrain and reskill.

Members and the Minister will no doubt aware that the 2009 Steele review of NHS dentistry proposed a tiered model of care, matching patients to the right professionals at the right time, with prevention at its core. It was never fully realised, but maybe it is time to dust it off. A genuinely tiered NHS dental service would cut waiting lists, free up dentists to focus on complex care, and make better use of dental nurses and dental therapists, who are already trained and ready to do those jobs. Most importantly, it would shift the system towards prevention, not crisis management, which I note is a core priority of the Department.

I thank my fellow sponsors of this debate: the hon. Members for Yeovil (Adam Dance) and for Waveney Valley (Adrian Ramsay), and the hon. Member for Sunderland Central (Lewis Atkinson), who is not in his place.

Oral health is fundamental to dignity, confidence, employability and overall health. The ability to see a dentist when needed should never be treated as a luxury within a universal healthcare system, yet that is precisely what has happened. The consequences of that are not abstract but real, painful and increasingly visible. Tooth decay remains the leading cause of hospital admissions for children aged five to nine—though clearly poor parenting holds a lot of blame. A growing number of people are turning to so called DIY dentistry because they have no other option. That alone should give this House pause for thought.

We must be clear about what is driving this problem. It is often said that it is simply a workforce problem, but that is only part of the truth. As the Policy Exchange report “Pulling Teeth” sets out, there are over 37,000 dentists in England, yet only around 10,500 full time equivalent NHS dentists. There is not a shortage of dentists but a shortage of dentists who are willing to work under the NHS contract.

Does my hon. Friend agree that the British Dental Association, which has supplied an excellent briefing to many right hon. and hon. Members for this debate, is in no doubt at all that it is precisely the 2006 contract that lies at the heart of the problem? The BDA states that it wants two things from this debate: one is a clear timetable from the Government as to when they will start to renegotiate that contract; and the other is a firm deadline for the roll out of a new system in this Parliament. Those are the two things that we have been invited to press the Minister to deliver at the end of this debate.

My right hon. Friend is precisely right. The BDA is absolutely right to call for those two things; they are what the Government should be working towards. As my right hon. Friend said, the contract started in 2006 under the last Labour Government and was based on units of dental activity, and it is fundamentally misaligned with clinical reality. For example, it pays the same whether a dentist does one filling or six. Essentially, it rewards volume, not complexity, and it actively discourages preventive care.

We also had covid. We have to remember that around 4 million adults struggled to access dental care before covid, and that figure has now risen to nearly 14 million. Of course, covid alone did not create the crisis, but it did significantly accelerate and expose it, and we are still dealing with the aftermath.

This Government came into office promising action, yet nearly two years on, the gap between promise and reality is difficult to ignore. The roll out of additional appointments was delayed, and even where appointments have been delivered, the British Dental Association has noted that they amount to only around two extra urgent slots per dentist per month. That is not transformation; it is marginal adjustment.

At the same time, the long promised NHS workforce plan remains unpublished. The ambition to expand access depends entirely on having enough clinicians willing and able to deliver NHS care. Without a credible workforce strategy, the objectives of reform remain difficult to assess, let alone achieve. As has been mentioned, that pressure is not evenly distributed. In parts of rural England, there are as few as 10 NHS dental practices per 100,000 people. These so called dental deserts are not random but the predictable outcome of a system that fails to align funding with need.

My hon. Friend mentions rural communities and dental deserts. My constituency, Fylde, is split between rural and coastal, and those coastal areas are experiencing the same dental deserts. I agree that the dental contract is the root cause, and we want a commitment from the Minister to review it.

My hon. Friend hits the nail on the head, and as in so many healthcare cases, rural constituencies, and rural and coastal constituencies, are often hit the hardest. In my view, that is where the Government should be spending their efforts and money, in order to ensure that we get the same level of service in those areas as in large urban population centres.

That brings me neatly to my constituency, where the consequences are very real. One family contacted me about their daughter, who lives with a long term eating disorder and developed a serious dental infection. Despite seeking help, they faced delays, long waiting lists and limited access to specialist care, with treatment stretching close to a year. Another constituent raised the case of his wife, a head and neck cancer patient. Following chemotherapy, radiotherapy and surgery, she now faces severe and ongoing oral health complications, yet access to appropriate NHS dental follow up has been extremely limited, forcing reliance on expensive private care. Those are not isolated cases; they are emblematic of a system that is failing those who need it most.

We must also recognise the financial and operational pressures facing dental practices. Rising national insurance contributions, increased wage costs and high levels of missed appointments all add further strain. In some practices, missed appointments alone cost tens of thousands of pounds a year. In Haslemere in my constituency, the local hospital has a fully equipped dental suite that is, unfortunately, entirely unused despite clear local demand. That is not inefficiency; it is systemic failure.

Incremental change will not fix this. We need a credible workforce plan, genuine contract reform that rewards prevention, and a strategy for dental deserts that goes beyond short term fixes. We need a system that aligns capacity with need, rather than relying on historical allocations drawn up nearly two decades ago. More fundamental proposals are also on the table, including models that would extend coverage and give patients greater choice and control. Whether or not every element of that is agreed by the House, what is clear is that the status quo is failing too many people for us simply to continue as we are.

I have a lot of respect for the Minister—I am not entirely sure it is mutually given—and I have some questions for him. When will we see a fully funded and credible NHS dental workforce plan? How many additional dentists, hygienists and therapists are required to meet demand? What is the Government’s plan to ensure that dental deserts do not become a permanent feature of our healthcare system? Unless we answer those questions honestly, the Government are not reforming NHS dentistry; they are supervising its managed decline.

I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for granting this debate, and I declare an interest as co chair of the all party parliamentary group for dentistry and oral health. I pay tribute to the British Dental Association, our secretariat, for the work it continues to undertake to keep NHS dentistry in the spotlight. Due to my APPG role, I hear regularly from patients and dental professionals across the country, and the message I hear nationally is echoed by my constituents in Durham: NHS dentistry is becoming harder to access and the current system is not delivering the practical care that patients need. We need to measure access properly. Ministers should publish local data showing which practices are accepting new NHS patients, how many NHS clinical hours are being delivered, whether urgent care is being completed, how many children are being seen, and whether disease is being stabilised rather than left to worsen.

One issue raised with me is the NHS Business Services Authority reporting and payments. Recent system changes have led to incorrect payments, and have made it harder for practices to calculate associate dentists’ pay. For practices already operating under serious financial pressure, that creates yet more uncertainty. Another issue is unit of dental activity caps. One local dentist described a practice with the chair, the associate dentist and the patient ready to go, but no additional UDAs were available. The associate dentist was left, in their words, twiddling their thumbs, while patients were turned away or offered private care.

I also heard from award winning Claypath dental surgery, one of the last remaining NHS dentists in Durham city. The practice manager said the practice had “witnessed firsthand the steady destruction of NHS Dental Services over the last 20 years by successive Governments, that have used the demolition of NHS Dentistry as a way of saving money in the NHS”.

As part of the cost cutting, the practice’s contract was reduced by 2,000 exams in April. During an attempted appeal, the practice was told to accept the change or lose the whole contract. I ask the Minister: how does cutting contracts like that improve access for patients?

I welcome the Government’s recent steps, including the urgent care changes and the beginning of wider reform discussions, but tweaks to the existing system cannot become a substitute for fundamental reform. We need a clear timetable for formal negotiations on a new dental contract, a deadline for replacing UDAs in this Parliament, and proper funding, so that practices do not lose money for providing NHS treatment.

The challenge before us is to build a system that allows dentists who want to provide NHS care to do so, and a system that ensures that patients can access that care. The measure of a healthcare system is not how well it serves those who can afford an alternative, but how it protects those who cannot. We must stop treating the collapse of NHS dentistry as inevitable. A generation is growing up with pain, fear and preventable disease. We know the problems. We know the solutions. What we need now is action.

It is a pleasure to co sponsor the debate. In my constituency, registering with an NHS dentist as a new patient has become extremely difficult, if not impossible. East of England has the lowest number of NHS full time equivalent dentists per head of population. When Ministers say that the system is improving, I ask them to picture the reality for patients in rural communities: people travelling miles, sometimes for hours, for appointments, ringing dozens of practices without success, and waiting until pain becomes unbearable before seeking urgent care.

Leanne from Halesworth told me that it took three years to find an NHS dentist, while her children still cannot access NHS care. Another constituent, Michael from Dickleburgh, spent more than £2,000 on private treatment after being unable to access NHS treatment. Ministers have admitted that NHS dentistry has only enough budget for fewer than 40% of adults to be seen over a two year period. The principle that an NHS service should be available to everyone is in tatters when it comes to dentistry.

The Government have emphasised urgent appointments, but without additional workforce and funding, there would be fewer routine appointments, undermining the Government’s own prevention agenda. The British Dental Association estimates that the NHS dental budget has been cut by a third in real terms since 2010, reducing the allocation to 1.5% of the overall NHS budget. Further funding will clearly be needed to restore NHS dentistry as a universal service, yet when the Chancellor announced £29 billion of additional NHS funding in the spending review, the Minister indicated that none of that would likely be allocated to dental services.

Delayed routine care leads to greater pain, more complex treatment and higher costs for both the patient and the NHS. Nowhere is that clearer than in children’s oral health. Tooth decay is the leading cause of hospital admission among five to nine year olds in England—a totally shocking fact Dentists do not grow on trees. I am delighted that, following many conversations, the University of East Anglia will begin training students from 2027. However, the truth is that, at UEA and nationally, not enough funded places are being provided. The previous Government promised a 40% increase in dental training places, but no funding was attached either for training those additional clinicians or for commissioning the NHS dentistry workforce that they would eventually join. The current Government have announced further expansion of dental school places, which I welcome, but the funding remains inadequate.

Like me, the hon. Member represents a rural constituency. Does he agree that this issue affects us a lot worse in rural areas? We do not have universities close by to train dentists.

I absolutely agree with the hon. Member, who made an excellent speech in introducing this debate. Rural communities lose out so often when it comes to health services, and the decline they have seen in dentistry is a strong and worrying example of that.

Unless NHS dentistry becomes a place where clinicians can build sustainable careers, new graduates will continue to drift away from NHS practice. If NHS work is too costly for dental practices to deliver, we should not be surprised when surgeries replace NHS service with private care. The Government must pursue contract reform and ensure that dentists are funded for the work they do, with a strong emphasis on prevention. The crisis in NHS dentistry will continue to deepen if immediate action is not taken. If the Government are serious about targeting dental deserts, East Anglia should be one of the first in line.

I ask the Minister to do four things. Will he commit the funding needed to restore dental services? Will he support innovative therapist training models, such as Suffolk’s model? Will he review and reform NHS dental contracts, as promised? Will he commit to boosting the dental places in our region, and providing the places that we have lacked for decades?

I thank the hon. Member for Yeovil (Adam Dance) and others for securing this important debate.

Cornwall is a dental desert. Healthwatch Cornwall’s 2024 report found that every single NHS practice was closed to new adult patients. In Cornwall, under 30% of adults have seen a dentist in the last two years; across England, that figure is 40.7%. That is a stark reflection of the regional inequality, and the lack of access to basic healthcare. At the same time, the number of dentists in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly has fallen dramatically, from 285 in the year 2019-20 to just 221 in 2024-25. Since 2010, the proportion of the NHS budget spent on dentistry has more than halved. At best, NHS dentistry only ever covered about half the population.

Cornwall is rural and coastal, and like many such areas in the south west, we face real challenges in attracting and keeping dental professionals. Two years ago, more dental nurses left the workforce than joined it in every NHS region. In the south west, for every nurse who joined, two left. Every dental practice in Cornwall reports recruitment difficulties for all staff, and morale among NHS dentists is at a low, with more than six in 10 in England saying that they are thinking of leaving NHS dentistry. We need to make the NHS a place in which dental staff choose to build a career, and the golden hello scheme is a start. Cornwall and Isles of Scilly ICB has invested £188,000 in 11 posts across the area.

It is also crucial that we train more dentists. I recently visited the Peninsula dental school at Treliske in Truro, which is part of the University of Plymouth. Fourth year dental students train in Truro and offer free dental care. They provide essential treatment and community outreach to more than 30 local groups. That is exactly the type of model that we need. The school wants to expand its intake from 58 students to 72 students per year to meet demand and bring the region in line with the national average. If we train more dentists in Cornwall, we stand a better chance of keeping them there. The Government are expanding dental school places, with 50 extra dentists, which is brilliant, but I ask them to include Peninsula in the next wave.

There is a recognition that the current contract is flawed. It is based on UDAs, which effectively cap how many patients a dentist can see. If dentists exceed the cap, they are not paid for it; if they under deliver, money is clawed back. In Cornwall, only around two thirds of UDAs are delivered, which sometimes leads to millions of pounds being clawed back. That money could be used to treat patients. The money has historically been paid monthly in advance to practices, but unused money has not been repaid in some cases until the end of the year, which has made it hard to divert it to other uses.

Cornwall’s ICB has introduced an incentive scheme to encourage practices to hit a certain percentage of their target, so that less money needs to be returned. The Government have introduced reforms to the contract from April ’26. There will be a level of urgent care that is at an improved rate, and there will be a new care pathway for higher needs patients and more clinically complex cases.

Let me talk about some of the schemes already in place to tackle the acute dental need in Cornwall. Since July last year, there has been a dental van, run with Smile Together, which delivers care for our veterans, the fishing community and patients who have been waiting for urgent treatment. The Government’s scheme for brushing in schools has already reached up to three quarters of the schools in Cornwall, and up to six new dental practices are due to open in Cornwall soon, through the clawed back funding. This will not fix everything overnight, but there is positive reform. I will ensure that these changes are felt in Cornwall, because everyone deserves access to dentistry where it is needed.

With an immediate three minute time limit, I call Richard Foord.

I pay credit to my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil (Adam Dance) for working with the Backbench Business Committee to secure this debate. He knows that the south west is the worst affected region for NHS dentistry—according to NHS data from March 2025, fewer than one in three adults in the south west had seen a dentist in the previous two years. That is the lowest rate of any region, and a full 14 percentage points below the north east or the north west of England.

When people cannot access a dentist, they end up in an acute hospital. In 2023-24, one in every 460 people in the south west went to accident and emergency for a dental problem; that is almost twice as common as in London, where the figure was one in every 860 people. The south west has the highest vacancy rate for NHS dentists in the country, at 22%, and it also has one of the lowest ratios of full time dentists to head of population.

Despite the Government’s pledges and dental plans, little has changed on the ground. In 2025, just 38% of adults in Devon had been seen by a dentist in the previous two years. That is down from 54% a decade ago. Only 47% of children in the county had seen a dentist in the previous 12 months—down from 61% a decade ago. Those who cannot afford private dental treatment are often left with no choice but to let their children go without care for years. We must move towards a preventive model of dentistry. Affordable, routine check ups can catch problems early, saving the NHS the greater cost of emergency care later.

I want to give the example of Ken from Northleigh. Ken is a pensioner. He has dentures that no longer fit, and with no NHS dentists accepting patients in our area, he went to a local private dentist. That dentist told him that it would cost £800 to prepare his mouth and a further £3,000 for the new dentures. Ken is lucky—he has savings; he can afford to pay—but how could anybody on the state pension ever afford such a price?

The last Conservative Government proposed targeted recruitment incentives, or golden hellos. However, the local democracy reporter Bradley Gerrard discovered that only one had been taken up in Devon in November 2024. Let us properly fund the training and retention of dental professionals. No one should end up in A&E because they cannot get seen by a dentist. The Government say that they are serious about fixing the system; let us see it on the ground in our constituencies.

The question before us this evening is quite simple: are we prepared to rebuild NHS dentistry as a genuine public service? My constituents, and people across the country, demand and deserve NHS dental services that are accessible and available. I commend the campaign Toothless in Suffolk, which has been a tireless advocate, and many of my parliamentary colleagues who are in the Chamber this evening, who have spoken about their very own dental deserts.

Families should not have to choose between going private and going without. The Americans talk about English teeth—wonky and yellow. That myth was dispelled, but sadly it is returning; children being admitted to hospitals with dental abscess and decay was once rare, but it is now familiar. Before the election, I spoke of the decay of the nation’s teeth as a metaphor for the decay of the nation—what an outrage!

NHS dentistry disappeared in plain sight when the contracts were changed. The dentists simply switched their practice to private and informed their patients—it was not really a choice. This happened to me and, I expect, to many other Members. I was an ear, nose and throat surgeon in the NHS. I was paid to work at the hospital, not per case, but as part of a team tasked with providing a service to the population. The incentive was to work hard to benefit the greatest number of patients; nobody ever said to me that I could switch all my patients to strictly private operations in the hospital and charge a fee per case, yet that is what happened to NHS dentists. Surprise, surprise—private practice became very popular.

There are plenty of dentists, although it is true that we could do with more. I welcome the new dental school at the UEA and commend the vice chancellor and his team for their work on it. I welcome the plans to increase the number of overseas dentists by increasing places for the General Dental Council qualifying exam, as there are many dentists who would like to work here. I also welcome the emergency dental appointments now widely available using the underspend in the NHS dental contract to provide sessional dental appointments. I definitely welcome the emphasis on prevention and the toothbrush campaigns.

I thank my fellow hon. Member from Suffolk for giving way. He will be aware that the University of Suffolk is running training for dental therapists and hygienists, who are an important part of the jigsaw. The funding model is broken, because training a therapist receives support of only £5,000 a year, compared with £36,000 a year for dental students. Does he agree that that disparity needs to be addressed?

I thank my neighbour for his intervention. I agree that there is much that dental hygienists and dental nurses can do, especially in check up work.

There are many positive steps, and I commend our excellent Minister on everything he has done, but we urgently need the new contract and incentives and rewards for NHS dentistry. This debate is to ask the Government when that will happen, and what barriers are preventing that. The teeth of the nation depend on it.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil (Adam Dance), my constituency neighbour, on securing this important debate and on all his campaigning. I began my campaign in my part of Somerset’s dentistry desert in 2021, when I was not an MP. My survey found that just under half had access to an NHS dentist. When I surveyed 2,000 people last year, things had got worse and only 35% of children in Taunton and Wellington could access an NHS dentist. The House of Commons Library has pointed out that from 2015, the last Government cut funding for NHS dental services by a sixth in real terms.

I start by welcoming some good news. Thanks to the campaigning by my hon. Friend and me, and many others, we can confirm the news from NHS Somerset, published today, that 10,000 more units of dental activity were delivered last year in the county than in 2024-25. Let us hope for more improvement as this financial year progresses. In addition, I had the privilege of cutting the ribbon at Wellington’s new NHS dental practice in October. I thank the Minister for the work he does. His commitment to this issue is genuine. I thank the Dentistry For You team and all those in the NHS locally, because they are achieving these things against a background of limited resources and a broken funding system.

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way and my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil (Adam Dance) for securing this debate. I welcome the fact that the Government have decided to tie in newly qualified dentists so that they work in the NHS for three years, but does my hon. Friend agree that since that only starts next year, and the crisis is now, we should be starting that measure in September 2026, not waiting until September 2027?

My hon. Friend and near neighbour is, as so often, exactly right. I completely agree that urgency is needed in the training of new dentists and in the contract changes, which I will come to.

One sentence in NHS Somerset’s recent announcement stands out: “There is currently insufficient funding to provide NHS dental care for the entire population and…available resources can only support around half of the county’s residents.”

That means that 64,000 children in the county did not see a dentist at all last year, putting Somerset in the worst hit 5%. In Taunton and Wellington, it is even worse than the average. Hard pressed parents responded to my survey to record that they are paying £100 a year per child because they cannot access NHS dentists. That grosses up to £4 million spent by parents in my constituency in the last five years. In a cost of living crisis, that is clearly unacceptable. Increasingly, I and they believe that we should be prioritising children for NHS appointments, and I urge the Government to consider that in their reforms. It is the contract that is at fault, as Eddie Crouch and all the brilliant work he does with the British Dental Association have shown.

In the longer term, the key to resolving this issue is prevention. In April I became an ambassador for The Magic Dentist, a charity that brings together local primary schools and local dental practices. The charity is trying to roll out that model across the country, and I want to pay credit to its hard work, including that of its founder Nicki Rowland and the trustee Councillor George Western. I congratulate them on enabling yet another primary school—alongside Holy Trinity Church of England primary school in Taunton—to find a partner in a local dental practice, Todays Dental, led by Rob Paxman. I also thank Charlie MacEwan and the WPA Benevolent Foundation. Beginning with prevention where it works—with children—is exactly what we need to do.

The Liberal Democrats are clear about what is needed: the scrapping of UDAs, reform of the dental contract, a fair share of the £29 billion for NHS dentistry, and a proper workforce plan. Until then, charities will continue to have to pick up the pieces.

It is now 9.20 pm, and I have waited all day to be able to say what I am going to say—in three minutes. I cannot give the speech that I wanted to give, but I had to come to speak up on behalf of my constituents, particularly the patients at the West Auckland dental practice who have just been told that they can no longer have NHS dentistry.

Let me take the House back to three years ago, when two dental practices closed in our area, one in Shildon and one in Bishop Auckland. A year later, a month before the general election, another practice sent letters to parents saying that because of “the way in which the NHS contract is funded and managed…and a national shortage… We have…come to the realisation that we are unable to offer…NHS patients the level of care they deserve, and…will no longer be able to provide NHS dental services to child patients from 1st October 2024.”

That was the situation that this Government inherited: an underfunded service, a broken contract—the reasons in 2006 for introducing it were sound at the time, but it was broken and needed reform—and the off rolling of patients.

Some things have gone well, and the Government have made progress. It was right to focus on using the underspend for emergency appointments, because people were pulling their own teeth out in the most extreme cases. However, appointments have not always been easy to come by, and often require people to travel across the county. Toothbrushing in schools is massively welcomed by dentists, but less so by teachers. I would be grateful if the Minister could tell us what can be done to increase the take up of that programme. The increase in the number of places in dental training schools is welcome, as is progress on the new contract, but many dentists are telling me that the care pathways pay less by the hour, and they are not sure whether they will see the value in them. We must be honest: the number of people with access to NHS primary care, as opposed to emergency appointments, has barely increased in two years.

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech on behalf of his constituents, and he has mentioned dentistry challenges in his area. Like other Members, he has talked about the contract, which currently rewards activity rather than prevention. Is that one of the changes that he would like to see?

I would like to see that change, and I urge the Minister not to delay the consultation on new proposals on the contract. However, in addition to bringing about reform, we need to return funding levels to where they were in 2010. I recently met dentists from across Durham, including one of the chief negotiators for the British Dental Association. They had warm words to say about the Minister, who they felt was sincere and serious in tackling the problem, but they felt that the resources were simply not enough, and that—as has already been pointed out this evening—£1.5 billion a year is enough to fix NHS dentistry so that everyone in the country could have an NHS dentist. That is the equivalent of a 0.3% increase in national insurance, or £3 per month per taxpayer. It is not a large sum in the grand scheme of things, compared to what could be saved if there were not so many people facing dental emergencies.

I want to press for cross party support on this issue. It is all very well everyone coming here and saying that we need to reform the contract—and we do—but we must face the fact that we need to fund NHS dentistry properly, and it is worth the investment to do so. It is intolerable to keep hearing from the Opposition Benches opposition to the investment that we are putting into the national health service. A moment ago we heard a call for some of that £29 billion to be spent on dentistry, so I say, “Support the £29 billion, and yes, let us fund NHS dentistry.”

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil (Adam Dance) for leading today’s debate. Across my Thornbury and Yate constituency, the lack of dental practices providing NHS services has been particularly acute. As I put it to the Minister last week, less than a third of the adults, and just under half of the children, in my patch have been seen by an NHS dentist in the past two years—both figures are well below the national average. Constituents write to me regularly to express their frustration at the lack of local NHS provision.

I have been assured that the NHS does everything to ensure that patients who lose access through privatisation receive adequate treatment elsewhere, but that has not been the experience of many of my constituents. David waited nearly two years for an appointment, only for his practice to go private. His situation deteriorated to the point that he required emergency treatment, which the NHS did provide, but the underlying problem was never fully resolved and he has been advised by his practice to go for private treatment. That is a failure, and not only in the immediate sense. Short term emergency care does not address the underlying cause. The longer term cost, whether to the NHS through repeat emergency appointments or to my constituent through lost earnings and private fees, is significantly greater than the cost of timely treatment. This Government have now been in power for two years, but David has seen no improvement in his dental care. I think that speaks for itself. David’s story is one of dozens that I have heard. Another constituent, Doris, was left with an infection for months, only to be told that there is no NHS provision for molar treatment in south Gloucestershire. She, too, had to go private.

Members across the House have highlighted the steps that the Government need to take, particularly on the contract, and I want to make two points. First, in response to a written question, the Minister told me that no data is held centrally by the NHS on NHS dental appointments that have been cancelled due to practices converting to private provision. How can we measure progress if we count only those coming in through the front door, not those leaving at the rear? Secondly, rural dental provision has higher operating costs and lower patient density. How can that challenge be reflected in the contract review?

Thornbury and Yate is exceptionally poorly served by NHS dentistry. I have written separately to the Minister to request a meeting to review our local situation, and I hope he will take me up on that.

Let me start by saying that I love dentists, and I will tell the House why. Twenty years ago, almost to the day, I completed my last GCSE history exam and decided to go and celebrate with my friends in Drighlington, in my constituency. We chose to cycle down New Lane, which is between Gildersome and Drighlington. New Lane is on a steep hill and, as I discovered, it has speed bumps. My friends and I decided to race down the hill and, in my desperation to win, I went faster than any of them. I do not remember my face meeting the concrete, but I do remember the sensation that one feels when going down on a rollercoaster. That is the good news. The bad news is that my face was badly damaged and my teeth were completely destroyed.

I am eternally grateful to the NHS doctors and nurses who put my face back together, but unfortunately it required years of treatment from dentists to fix my teeth, and the treatment is still ongoing today. I am very grateful to have been served by NHS dentists over the past 20 years, and they have done extremely well in dealing with composite bonding. If any Member of this House has experienced composite bonding, they will know that it can have a transformative effect, but they will also know that it can break really easily. I grind my teeth at night, which means that in some cases I have had weekly appointments at NHS dentists, just to maintain their appearance. Unfortunately, some of my teeth could not be saved and I had to settle for some veneers, but I still go back for my composite bonding appointments.

Despite that story, I still count myself as one of the lucky ones, because if that accident were to happen to me today, I imagine that my experience would be very different. My constituents contact me all the time to tell me about the lack of access to NHS dentistry. In some cases, I have constituents who are told by NHS dentists that they will be seen within six to 12 months, but if they call back and ask for a private appointment, they can be seen that day. The only difference, of course, is that it will cost six times the amount to be seen.

Does my hon. Friend agree that this is a massive cost of living pressure for people who cannot afford a dentist, and that it would probably be worth our putting in the investment to ensure everyone can have an NHS dentist?

I absolutely agree we should consider that. It must be done within the fiscal rules and we must find the money in a responsible way, but given we have heard some sources cite £1.5 billion to fix dentistry, I think that is a very reasonable figure to consider finding.

I do think there is a solution, which is fundamental reform of the NHS dental contract. It must start considering prevention much more seriously, incentivise dentists to treat complex problems, not just simple ones, and focus on the workforce demands. Those three things are difficult, but we are here to grasp the nettle. This Labour Government and most Labour MPs, just like me, were elected to do the difficult things in office. I know that this is difficult, we need to find extra resources and there are no easy choices when it comes to fixing any of our public services, including dentistry, but we have this time in office, and we should use it.

It is great to follow the hon. Member for Leeds South West and Morley (Mark Sewards) as I recall my husband losing his two front teeth to a crash helmet in his face, and my nephew Arlo currently has plastic on his teeth having lost his two front teeth at the age of 10 to his little brother.

Jonathan, a senior NHS dentist in my constituency, whom I consider to be a true expert, as he has worked for almost 40 years in NHS dentistry, told me that, in 2024, we had a £9 million underspend in our dentistry budget—goodness knows where that has gone—and a freedom of information request has revealed that, this year, £6 million was removed from a supposedly ringfenced budget for dentistry. What is going on in Dorset?

The ICBs have arranged for urgent care to be done through NHS 101, but no one knows about it. That means one provider that provided 4,000 appointments last year will deliver only 1,300 this year. Alongside my colleagues, I have been calling for a dental school in Dorset for years. It seems that we may be getting something in Bournemouth, but only for dental technicians, not for dentists, which is not much good to those of us who need complex care. In Poole, we have heard proposals for a centre for complex care for people with disabilities or neurodiversity, but we need £4 million of capital, and no one can tell us where capital for dentistry comes from. So it seems that in Dorset things are in a bit of a mess.

We have heard that dentists were told they could have an additional 10% in the number of dental units, but they were not given the information until six weeks before the end of the year, meaning they have no opportunity to spend them. Residents who do have a dentist tell me that their dentists are refusing extractions or anything complicated, instead referring them to the hospital, where they are added to the secondary care waiting list. Why? Because the dentists cannot make enough money from them, and the tax trap apparently means they are reducing their number of hours on the NHS, because the tax treatment of the fees in the private sector means that they are better off doing it that way round. Frankly, it is a complete mess.

I welcome the changes that mean dentists have to stay in the NHS for three years, but I do have to ask the question: why should our residents only have junior dentists dealing with their complex care? It is a disgrace that, over the five years to 2024, 100,000 children were admitted to hospital with rotting teeth. This issue is now urgent. We cannot waste any more time, and if it is not addressed, we will continue to lose NHS dentists as quickly as my constituents and our colleagues are losing their teeth.

In my constituency of Melksham and Devizes in Wiltshire, in two years only 29% of adults were seen by dentists. Only 56% of Wiltshire’s children are seen by an NHS dentist each year, which is a figure of shame, given that the NHS recommends that children be seen regularly from their very first tooth.

Nationally, the picture is just as bleak. According to NHS England, over 12 million children across the country did not see an NHS dentist at all in the year to June 2024. The consequences are severe. Tooth decay is now the leading cause of hospital admissions for children aged six to 10 in England, with over 35,000 children admitted each year for tooth extractions under general anaesthetic. Those risky procedures are almost entirely preventable.

The lack of access to dental services across the country has a devastating knock on impact on our country’s overall health, evidenced by rising levels of oral cancers in the UK. These include cancers of the tongue, lips, gums, tonsils and throat—the eighth most common cancer in the UK, with nearly 12,000 new cases recorded in 2023. Eddie Crouch, chair of the British Dental Association, has pointed out that dentists are on the frontline of detecting those cancers before they turn fatal. With early detection, oral cancers have a survival rate of around 90%, but if diagnosis is delayed that drops to just 50%. The ongoing crisis in NHS dentistry is therefore not just a matter of convenience, but a matter of life and death for some patients.

The previous Health Secretary was right when he said that cancer survival should not come down to who won the lottery of life. I urge the Government to heed his words and act with urgency to end the dental deserts, restore children’s services before a generation grows up without routine care, and rebuild the services that catch those cancers early and save lives.

Lastly, on Ukrainian dentists who could be working for the NHS, will the Minister acknowledge their qualifications and allow them to practice here? The current situation is ridiculous, with a professor of dentistry in my area, for example, reduced to working as a dental assistant.

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

The phrases “dental desert” and “DIY dentistry” are becoming so normalised that it is easy to forget the human cost behind those terms. In 2025, over 5 million children did not see a dentist at all. Some 60% of adults have also not seen a dentist in at least the two years prior to June 2025. Barriers to accessing NHS dental care remain higher than ever, with workforce shortages, limited NHS capacity and geographical isolation creating an unjust postcode lottery.

Those challenges are often most acute in rural, coastal and deprived communities, as we have heard. The Darzi report found that these communities particularly lack access to NHS dentistry. Across much of rural England, including nearly the whole south west and much of the east of England, there are fewer than 46 dentists per 100,000 people. Research conducted by the British Dental Association and the Daily Mirror found that 96% of dentists in England are refusing to take on new NHS patients—we heard that today. This dental desert is leaving millions without access to dental care, with dire consequences. There is a significant correlation between lower availability of NHS dental care and higher demand on already stretched accident and emergency departments.

Tooth decay is now the most common reason for hospital admission in children aged between six and 10 years. Between 2018 and 2024, over 100,000 children were admitted to hospital due to rotting teeth. This is utterly unacceptable. Our children deserve better.

A 2023 poll found that one in five people who failed to get an NHS dentist appointment turned to DIY dentistry. One dentist in Epsom and Ewell shared his distressing experiences with patients. He described how, in desperation, his patient had resorted to using a pair of pliers to extract teeth, filing down the sharp edges of a broken tooth, and even purchasing temporary dental cement to try to fill an open cavity. This is a not too uncommon story that we hear among our constituents. In a recent survey looking into why people resort to DIY dentistry, 36% of participants said that their pain was so severe they acted out of immediacy, 33% cited the high costs of private care, and 30% said it was the inability to get an NHS appointment. This is a national disgrace. We must fix it now.

The Labour Government have failed to take meaningful action. Their announcement in March to expand dental training schools amounts to only an extra 50 training places in real terms. It is a step in the right direction, but it is still a mere drop in the ocean. Even the previous Conservative Government, with their disastrous record on the NHS, overseeing waiting lists of up to 7.6 million, had more ambition. They committed to increasing the number of NHS dental training places by 24% by 2028-29 and 40% by 2031-32. Funding on their watch did fall by 16%, but they did have ambition. To make matters worse, Labour has also quietly dropped its manifesto pledge to deliver 700,000 more dental appointments, having delivered only around 100,000 urgent dental appointments so far. Labour also claims that the integrated care boards have commissioned over 1 million appointments, but commissioning appointments is different from actually delivering them.

The Liberal Democrats are clear: we must take urgent and decisive action. We would implement a £750 million dental rescue plan that would guarantee access to an NHS dentist for all who need urgent and emergency care, which would end the dental desert and DIY dentistry. We would also introduce an emergency scheme to guarantee access to free NHS dental check ups for children, new mothers, those who are pregnant and those on low incomes. In addition, we would provide guaranteed appointments for all those needing a dental check prior to undergoing surgery, chemotherapy or a transplant. Will the Labour Government implement those calls?

The issues with NHS dentistry cannot be solved with those measures alone. We must also urgently reform the current dental contract, which is fundamentally unfit for purpose, to stop the exodus of NHS dentists and increase access to NHS dentistry. The current system effectively sets quotas on the number of patients a dentist can see on the NHS, as dentists are commissioned to deliver a set number of units of dental activity, or UDAs. The system pays dentists vastly different prices per UDAs delivered, with some practices receiving £30 for each UDA, while others receive over £50 for the identical work.

One dentist constituent of mine told me about his practice’s commitment to providing NHS dentistry, but because of the UDA formula, he is compensated the same regardless of whether he fits one or five crowns in a patient. That means that his practice is having to subsidise the high overhead costs, including laboratory fees, to provide those vital NHS services. As a result, his practice is reliant on private dental services as a source of income, without which the business would not be able to survive. That model of NHS dentistry is simply not fit for purpose, and the impact of this system across the UK is undeniable.

While the number of dentists registered to provide care in the UK is at an all time high of nearly 48,000, having increased by 17% in the last decade, the number of dentists working in the NHS is falling. In England the total number of dentists doing some NHS work is only around 25,000, while the number of full time equivalent NHS dentists is just 10,727. English dentists have the lowest commitment to NHS dentistry across the UK. Only 38% of them spend at least three quarters of their time on NHS work, compared with 59% in Scotland, 45% in Wales and 39% in Northern Ireland.

In April, Labour announced a consultation on reform of the dental contract, which is due before this summer. But with a new Defence Secretary, a by election, a potential leadership contest and possibly a new Prime Minister, this Government are clearly distracted. Those distractions cannot be allowed to delay reform of the contract. Any delay risks the prospect of rolling out a new contract in this Parliament, which is what the country needs and what the Government have promised. Will the Labour Government commit to ensuring that the consultation on the dental contract will take place before this summer as previously stated?

The Liberal Democrats would fix the broken NHS dental contract, using flexible commissioning to better meet patient needs. That would also bring dentists back from the private sector to the NHS. We would also increase the number of dentist training places in the UK and continue to recognise the qualifications of EU trained dentists. NHS dentistry is in crisis and we must act now. Through the implementation of Liberal Democrat policies, people would be able to access the NHS dental treatments they need, ending dental deserts and DIY dentistry once and for all.

I call the shadow Minister.

I congratulate the hon. Members for Yeovil (Adam Dance), Sunderland Central (Lewis Atkinson) and Waveney Valley (Adrian Ramsay), and my hon. Friend the Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford), on securing this important debate. Madam Deputy Speaker, I once read that nothing you wear is more important than your smile, because it is your smile, and the laughter that comes with it, that brings joy and happiness to the world. In that spirit, I start by acknowledging some progress that this Government have made.

The previous Conservative Government began establishing dental schools in Norwich and Portsmouth, to bring the next generation of dentists, hygienists and dental therapists to local people. We started fixing the roots of dental education, and I am pleased that this Government have continued that, allocating 25 training places to each of those schools. That is of course good news.

As the Minister will know, it has been a long standing campaign of mine to get a dental school in Lincoln. Excellent progress has been made so far, with the hub and spoke model to help rural areas, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bridgwater (Sir Ashley Fox) described. The team at the University of Lincoln are just waiting for the final sign off from the General Dental Council and the Privy Council. I am hoping that there will soon be places for Lincolnshire in the plans for dental education.

To help bolster NHS dentistry, in 2024 the Conservative Government consulted on proposals to require dental graduates to work in the NHS for three years after qualifying. This Government’s 10-year plan committed to that policy, but I think we are waiting for a consultation to set out the proposals in greater detail. Can the Minister tell us whether it is still the Government’s intention to introduce tie ins to NHS dentistry for dental graduates and when the proposals will be in place?

As the Liberal Democrat spokeswoman, the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Helen Maguire), said, the previous Conservative Government committed to expanding dentistry training places by 40% over 15 years, and, despite population growth, there are still more dentists per 100,000 people than there were in 2009. This Government’s workforce plan should lay out how many dentists, hygienists and therapists we need to recruit, and how the Government are going to do it. Unfortunately, that workforce plan was due last year, before being delayed until spring ’26. It is now summer ’26. In response to a recent question, the Minister said that it was due imminently, which I am sure is quicker than “soon” and much quicker than “in due course”. If the Minister has time to define “imminently”, I would be most grateful.

It is not all about numbers. As the Minister himself has said, the issue is not the number of dentists, but the paucity of dentists who are doing NHS work. There is a case for making the NHS more attractive to dentists in the first place, as we know that dentists are disincentivised from working in the NHS. The main problem with that, as many have identified, is the contract created under the previous Labour Government in 2006. This has been a problem for some time; when I moved to Lincolnshire in the early 2000s, I remember travelling back to Redcar to see my wonderful NHS dentist, Mr Dixon, until he retired.

There are several issues with the units of dental activity model in the contract. First, the units fluctuate bizarrely between practices, creating inequities in payment. Secondly, the UDA does not really equate with the real time cost of delivering complex care. Thirdly, the UDA does not always cover the costs of care, meaning that dentists may be asked to provide some NHS care at a loss.

The Conservatives started to change those issues by raising the minimum UDA payment and giving care commissioners the tools they needed to address UDA rates locally to better support delivery of care for patients. The former Secretary of State said that he would sort it by meeting the BDA on day one, and I believe that he did in fact meet the BDA straightaway, but there seems to have been little progress since. In April, the Minister promised that a consultation on fundamental contract reform would launch before the summer, but we are now in June—can the Minister say when that will be ready? Does he expect to reform the dental contract in this Parliament, as he promised? The Government are focusing a lot of resources on abolishing NHS England and have cut ICB budgets by 50%. Are they so focused on restructuring that promises to patients are not getting delivered?

Speaking of delivery, the Government promised 700,000 urgent dental appointments and commissioned 1 million. In March, however, they admitted that just 100,000 additional urgent appointments had been taken up. I am aware of some dentists who are staffing appointments on call, on an in case basis, so how many unattended appointments did the Government pay for? The Minister has now broadened his definition of urgent, but is he confident that we will have the urgent need met, and that it will not be crowded out by his broader definition?

We have heard much about children’s teeth. In 2015, 42,209 children were admitted to hospital to have dental extractions due to decayed teeth; by 2024, that had fallen to 30,567—a drop, but still far too many. In 2025, however, that number rose to nearly 34,000. The previous Government introduced a Big Brush Club in south west England, and I note that was the only region to have a reduced number of admissions in the year 2024-25 for decay extraction. What has the Minister made of that programme? How does the Government’s programme differ from the Big Brush programme? Children need their teeth brushing during the holidays, at weekends and in the evenings—how is the Minister working on ensuring that parents deliver on their responsibilities then? It is indeed their responsibility to ensure that their children brush their teeth twice a day.

The Government’s 10-year plan rightly focuses on prevention, and one important preventive measure is the fluoridation of the water supply. The Government’s “Water fluoridation: health monitoring” report in 2026 found that children living in areas with a fluoridation scheme had a 20% lower incidence of tooth extractions. Will the Minister say what he is doing to explore expanding water fluoridation to help eliminate tooth decay?

Dentistry is important, because good oral health is not just about our teeth, mouth and gums. Research published in The Lancet reports a growing body of evidence suggesting that oral health is closely associated with conditions such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and Alzheimer’s. One’s dentist may also identify symptoms of Peutz Jeghers syndrome, Sjögren’s syndrome, nutritional deficits, Crohn’s disease and oral cancers.

Delivering on NHS dentistry is important for our wider health too, but so far it feels as though the Government have been all smiles but little action when it comes to making NHS dentistry work for everyone. I hope that the Minister and his new Secretary of State will not seek to blame others, but instead recognise that they now have the levers in their hands—indeed, they have had them in their hands for nearly two years now—and use them to address these concerns, and quickly.

I congratulate the hon. Members for Yeovil (Adam Dance), for Waveney Valley (Adrian Ramsay) and for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) on securing this important debate.

When we came into office, we inherited an appalling situation not just in dentistry but right across my primary, community and social care portfolio. The last Government tinkered at the edges—for example, taxpayers footed the bill for their new patient premium to the tune of £126 million, but it had no impact on patients, so we cancelled it as a total waste of time and money. What is more, the previous Government utterly failed to reform the contract, to set up any new training schools or to expand any training places. I am afraid that the end result is this Dickensian state of affairs, where people have been resorting to DIY dentistry and tooth decay is the No. 1 cause of hospital admission for children aged five to nine. Once again, it therefore falls to a Labour Government to fix the problem, and our job is twofold: to get NHS dentistry back on its feet and to make it fit for the future.

We will continue the shift to prevention by backing supervised tooth brushing, water fluoridation, and healthy food and drink for children. We will be consulting on long term reforms to the dental contract. We have been cracking on with our plan for change to end the misery faced by hundreds of thousands of people unable to get urgent care. To start with, we are on track to have delivered more than 2.5 million additional dental treatments compared with the same period before the general election. Those have been delivered thanks to our work on cutting the underspend; in July 2024, we inherited shocking annual underspends in dentistry—money that the previous Government could not even get out of the door due to their sheer incompetence.

The Minister will recall that when he wrote to me on 23 April, he confirmed that under Labour 4% fewer dental treatments were performed in Somerset than in the same period before the general election. If everything is so wonderful, why is dentistry in Somerset worse now under his watch than it was under the last Government?

Somerset is an outlier. There are significant problems in Somerset due to access to dentistry, for all the reasons we have talked about in this debate, which are particularly acute in Somerset. I have had calls with a senior official from the ICB there to try to figure out what is going on, because it is an outlier.

We have seen a reduction in the underspend of more than 90%, because under this Government, every penny allocated for NHS dentistry is being invested in NHS dentistry. We are committed to reforming the dental contract within this Parliament, with a focus on matching resources to need, improving access, promoting prevention, rewarding dentists fairly and ensuring that we use the skills of the whole dentistry family. We will publicly consult on future proposals. There is no such thing as a perfect payment model. We are not rushing these changes, because the dental system is complex and we have to get this right.

I thank the Minister for all his replies to my questions. Can he give me a timescale for when the contract will change? He also mentioned to the hon. Member for Bridgwater (Sir Ashley Fox) that Somerset is an outlier, so will he take me up on an offer to visit Somerset?

I thank the hon. Member for that. As I have said, the contract will be reformed within this Parliament. I would be happy to receive a letter or representations from him with a suggestion along the lines he just set out.

In the meantime, while we are working on long term reform, our 2026 reform package includes a range of elements, but here are the three highlights. First, we have embedded urgent dental care into NHS practices, making it easier for patients to get support when they need it most. Secondly, dentists can now receive higher payments for treating patients who need urgent care. That means they have extra incentives to provide urgent care on the NHS for issues such as severe pain, infections or dental trauma. Thirdly, from this month, those requiring complex care, such as treatment for severe gum disease or decay in multiple teeth, will be able to schedule a single, planned package of treatment and pay one patient charge for that, rather than having several courses of treatment. That could save them up to £200 a year—that is money going straight back into the pockets of working people.

Does the Minister accept that there is a high degree of unanimity in all parts of the House about this terrible situation? Does he also accept that the British Dental Association traces this back to the 2006 contract? What it wants to know is: when are the formal negotiations on a new contract going to begin, and what is the date of the Minister’s deadline to introduce the new system in the lifetime of this Parliament, as promised in his general election manifesto?

I suspect that the entire country blames the situation far more on the 14 years of neglect and incompetence from the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.

We are absolutely committed to delivering a domestic pipeline of dentists. That is vital, but we know that it will take time, so to address the immediate workforce challenge, we have reformed the General Dental Council’s exam process for fully qualified dentists from overseas, so that they can register to practice in the UK. Thanks to the action we have taken, over 2,000 extra dentists per year will be registered every year from 2028. They are generally already living here and waiting for the opportunity to get accredited and start practising; they are being blocked only by the uselessness of the previous Government.

We are absolutely committed to making sure that we are training for the future. That is why we have announced the accreditation of two new dental schools, at Portsmouth and the University of East Anglia, and I am delighted to say that each has been allocated 25 new places per year from 2027. This is the first sustained expansion of new dental school places in nearly 20 years, driven forward by this Government and backed by £11 million per annum. There will be a new generation of dentists, training in state of the art facilities.

While I was on my visit to Portsmouth, I told students that this Government would back them once they graduated. Our proposals from December will see better support for staff, with improved access to discretionary payments such as long term sick pay, funding for annual appraisals, support for career development, and clearer guidance about their benefits and contracts. At the same time, we will now make it a requirement for newly qualified dentists to practice in the NHS for a minimum period, intended to be at least three years. We are laying the foundations of dentistry recovery. We have put a floor under the decline that began in 2010.

I cannot understand why we have to wait an extra year to introduce that provision. It will take three years, while those students are in college, for it to actually kick in, will it not? I am wondering why the Minister does not introduce the measure in September this year, with the new dental students.

It is because we have to work out, particularly with employment lawyers, exactly how the modalities of a three year tie in would work. It does impinge on employment law, so careful thought and consultation is required; it will kick in for the 2027-28 academic year.

We cannot repair 14 years of neglect and incompetence overnight, but this Government have begun the process of rebuilding NHS dentistry, including through reforms to the dental contract that prioritise patients with the greatest needs. We are taking important steps towards improving access in dental deserts and rural areas, and delivering a better deal for dentists. We are bolstering the workforce with thousands more dentists, delivering more dental school places in underserved areas, and reinvesting nearly £400 million back into NHS dentistry, thanks to our work on the underspend. We are also on the path to delivering 2.5 million additional courses of treatment compared with the same period before the general election.

None of this happens by magic. It is thanks to the decisive action and hard work of this Government. And this is just the beginning. As I have stated many times at this Dispatch Box, I am personally committed to consulting on and delivering fundamental reform of the dental contract by the end of this Parliament, but I make no apology for taking time to get this right. The issues are complex and there is no consensus on the perfect approach. I will continue to work with the sector to understand its concerns, and to listen to patients, and I will ensure that the contract reforms we have introduced this year are just the start of building an NHS dental system of which we can all be proud.

It is late; I will be quick, so that we can all go home, brush our teeth and get some sleep. I thank everyone for their contributions to the debate, my co sponsors —the hon. Members for Sunderland Central (Lewis Atkinson), for Waveney Valley (Adrian Ramsay) and for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford)—and the Minister, who I hope will follow up on what we have discussed today.

I will leave the House with my survey results again: 100% of dentists in Yeovil constituency and 82% of the public are not happy with the progress that this Government have made on fixing NHS dentistry. Let us roll up our sleeves, work across parties and finally get it fixed.

Question put and agreed to. Resolved, That this House is concerned about NHS dentistry; notes that over a quarter of a million people have signed a petition calling for urgent action to save NHS dentistry and make it fit for the 21st century; regrets that nearly 14 million people were unable to access NHS dentistry in England in 2025; welcomes the Government’s commitment to both tackle and rebuild dentistry for the long term; and calls on the Government to set out a clear timetable for the fundamental reform of the NHS dental contract, and to improve retention of NHS dentists and access for patients across the country.