Oral Answers to Questions

George Freeman Excerpts

Tuesday 5th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Stephenson]

The hon. Gentleman sounds like a broken record, as usual. The Department has no evidence to suggest that EU exit is leading to sustained medicine shortages. Shortages occur for a wide range of reasons and are affecting countries all over the world.

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

Rural Norfolk is experiencing a dental crisis and a generation of children are in danger of going without dental care. I welcome the dental recovery plan, but I notice that it will be four or five years before we get more dentists. Last week, NHS Norfolk and Waveney integrated care board announced a £17 million underspend on dentistry. Will the Minister agree to meet with me and the ICB to work out how we get more money out now to help dentistry in Norfolk today?

[Victoria Atkins]

One of the many ways we have tackled access to dental care is to ensure that those dentists who have a contract to conduct NHS work are using them to the top of their licence. We are encouraging dentists to do that through the new patient premium and a higher rate paid for units of dental activity. There is so much more to the plan. Labour keeps trying to claim credit for our plan, but the truth is that our plan promises 2.5 million appointments while its plan promises a miserly 700,000.

Oral Answers to Questions

George Freeman Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Maria Caulfield]

Through the investment we are putting in, particularly in the hon. Lady’s local area, there are a number of initiatives to help support children and young people with their mental health. The Sandbox scheme, which is a funded NHS service, supports those in the south Staffordshire area; Malachi provides family support across Tamworth and east Staffordshire; and Combined Wellbeing, which is an online resource, covers north Staffordshire. There is also the Family Wellbeing Service, Action for Children for those aged five to 18 with mild to moderate mental health needs, and the Staffordshire Emotional Health and Wellbeing Service for those aged five to 18. I would recommend that the hon. Lady’s constituents look up those services, because we are funding them to improve mental health care for children in her local area.

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

The agony and damage of undiagnosed and untreated mental health conditions is nowhere more acute than in rural areas, where we see an epidemic of silent suffering. The Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust has long struggled with a series of management problems. I am sure the Minister has seen the recent report highlighting that between 2019 and 2022, we saw over 8,500 avoidable deaths—that is nearly 45 a week. Will she agree to meet me, other Norfolk and Suffolk MPs, and those affected to look at what is really going on here and make sure that we turn that trust into a beacon of the best mental health services, rather than the worst?

[Maria Caulfield]

I thank my hon. Friend for raising this issue. We were holding regular meetings with Norfolk and Suffolk MPs, the trust, the Care Quality Commission and NHS England, and with the new management team, that trust did appear to finally be turning things around. However, I am concerned to hear the points that my hon. Friend has raised. I am very happy to restart those meetings and will ask my office to arrange them as quickly as possible.

Dental Training College: East Anglia

George Freeman Excerpts

Tuesday 11th October 2022 Commons Chamber

[Jerome Mayhew]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. The only phrase that I would pick him up on is that he has “a foot in both camps”. I do not think there should be two camps. This is an East Anglian solution, whereby the proposals are complementary and, in time, they should both be implemented.

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

I commend my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour for raising this issue and highlighting the huge pressures that the dental service in his area and mine is experiencing on the ground. Many of our constituents are struggling and this proposal would not only make our region a leader in the science and technology of dentistry, but help to meet that demand and need on the ground. With new housing, the pressure will only get more acute in the next few years.

[Jerome Mayhew]

My hon. Friend is entirely right. There is a further point to be made about the collaboration between the University of East Anglia and the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, because they also have the Norwich research park co-located. I am thinking particularly of the Quadram Institute, the sole focus of which is world-leading research on the gut microbiota. I cannot pretend to know exactly what the gut microbiota are, but I know that they start with the mouth. There is huge capacity for proper, hard research in the area, and it could be assisted by a dental training school in Norwich. That is the first solution.

The second solution, which is also needed, is for the dental school in Norwich to complement the University of Suffolk’s plans to build a centre for dental development in Ipswich to support further career development in the region, attracting and retaining newly qualified dentists. My hon. Friends the Members for Bury St Edmunds (Jo Churchill), for Waveney (Peter Aldous) and for Ipswich (Tom Hunt) and others have all pushed for that.

The truth is that we need both to attract qualified dentists in the short term and to find a long-term solution to the wider training problem. It may be that an assessment is made nationally that there is no need for additional dental training seats, but people are human. We have to look beyond the empirical analysis and recognise that training needs to be offered in a location of real shortage. That location is East Anglia, and Norfolk in particular.

As a Conservative, I believe that people should have power over their own lives and that communities should not be dictated to by national Government. Rather, they should be empowered to come up with their own solutions to their local needs. We know what the problem is, and we have a solution to fix it locally; we just need the Government to trust the people to let us get on and do it.

We simply need more dentists and dental technicians in East Anglia. We recognise that budgets are tight and that timings may have to be stretched. We accept that short-term fixes are sometimes more powerful arguments in politics than long-term solutions. We simply ask the Minister to agree to meet the University of East Anglia team to learn at first hand how we can make East Anglian dentistry better, and to be inspired by their practical vision.

--- Later in debate ---

[George Freeman (Mid Norfolk) (Con)]

As a former Minister for life science and for science and research, I rise very briefly to highlight the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Broadland (Jerome Mayhew) made about the microbiome and the mouth—the buccal cavity—as a primary diagnostic for our understanding of the role of the biome and of gut flora and fauna, not only in good health but in diseases such as cancer. As a diagnostic tool, it could make our region a leader in the diagnostics of the digestive system and the gut biome, which would have a whole bunch of other important secondary health benefits. For that reason, I commend my hon. Friend’s case to Ministers on the Front Bench.