NHS Dentistry

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Tuesday 9th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

I am going to make a little progress, but I promise to give way later.

The whole House understands that the pandemic placed a long-lasting and heavy burden on NHS dentistry. [Interruption.] I hear groans from Opposition Members, but they cannot ignore the fact that some 7 million people did not come forward for appointments during that long period of the pandemic because dentists had to shut, and we were unable to accommodate those needs within the system because of the severe strictures under which we were all placed as a society. We shepherded the sector through the pandemic with £1.7 billion of direct support to compensate for NHS activity that could not be delivered. As we recover from the pandemic there are no quick fixes, but our recovery is well under way. Let me give the latest statistics, because the hon. Member for Ilford North missed them out in his speech. The Government delivered 6 million more courses of NHS dental treatment in 2022-23 than in the previous year. [Interruption.] In the two years to June 2023, the number of adults seeing a dentist increased by 1.7 million compared to the number in the previous year, and 800,000 more children saw a dentist in the year to June 2023.

Opposition Members cannot have it both ways. While I was reading out those statistics they were saying, “You cannot make those comparisons because of the pandemic”, but that is the point: people did not come forward during the pandemic, so, as we must all know from experience in our own constituencies, there is a backlog that dentists around the country are having to work through—and they are making progress.

[Dame Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

rose—

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[Victoria Atkins]

As I have explained, in relation to dentistry but also in relation to wider healthcare, the long-term workforce plan, which was requested by NHS England and by clinicians, is the means of laying those foundations for the future of the NHS. I will now give way to the hon. Member for Wallasey (Dame Angela Eagle).

[Dame Angela Eagle]

I thank the Secretary of State. I wanted to intervene earlier when she was talking about the pandemic. In my constituency many people were thrown off their dentists’ lists during the pandemic, often with no notice, and then found that they could not register anywhere else. That is what happened, I believe, all over the country. Can the Minister explain what she is going to do about it? It was not that people were not visiting their dentists; they were denied access.

[Victoria Atkins]

The hon. Lady has raised an interesting and important point, because, of course, dentists are independent contractors to the NHS, and I have to work with the levers that are available to me. As I have said, we have already invested £1.7 billion to try to help with the recovery, and the House will, I hope, look forward to our dentistry recovery plan when it comes to other ways in which we can improve that. The important point, however, is that because those dentists are independent contractors, we must work with the profession to encourage them back to the NHS to offer the services that we all want to see.

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[Dame Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Wakefield (Simon Lightwood), who made a superb speech. I have childhood memories of much older relatives who grew up before the NHS was created having no teeth left at all—they had had them all extracted because it was cheaper. I never thought that might start to happen again, but I fear that in some cases we are getting far too close to it with the current situation in our dental service. As many hon. and right hon. Members have pointed out in today’s debate, this is not only serious for oral health but has other health connotations. New medical insights link oral hygiene with heart and lung health. If we neglect oral hygiene to the extent that we are—we have heard about that in the debate—that will have huge implications for the health of future generations.

As Labour’s motion sets out, NHS dentistry is in crisis and is approaching breaking point, if it has not already passed it. The people of the UK are paying the price, and the poorest are paying a much heavier price. The Nuffield Trust says that NHS dentistry

“is at its most perilous point in its 75-year history.”

In Wallasey, my constituents are living with the reality of that day to day. As we have heard, a seven-year-old is more likely to be hospitalised for rotting teeth than for any other medical issue. That is an astonishing statistic. Many people—including my constituents—are growing up in places where they simply cannot get access to dental care. In Wallasey, only two dental surgeries will take a child as a new patient, and not a single one is taking any new adult patients on to its books.

In Wallasey, we have seen people kicked off existing lists without notice. That happened often during the pandemic, with the excuse that they had not visited the dentist in two years—they could not, as the dentists were closed because of the pandemic—and they cannot get access to another provider. There are care homes in my constituency where there is no access to dental treatment for those living in them. I have had email after email from constituents writing to me in despair, disbelief and often pain, all unable to get an appointment. NHS workers, an expectant mother, a retired firefighter, concerned parents and disabled people with declining health are all unable to see a dentist because of the terrible 14 years of Tory neglect.

Last summer, Sarah wrote to me when she was at her wits’ end. She had moved into my constituency from Liverpool a few years ago with her partner, pleased to be closer to family as they prepared to welcome a baby. Despite their home being close to four different dentists, Sarah was unable to register with any surgery. Each one was not accepting new patients. None even had a waiting list that she could join. She has now lost one molar and broken three. She has tried and failed to get an emergency appointment numerous times, and she has had to call 111 in desperation. She is in constant pain and still has no access. Her little boy, who is now four years old, has never seen a dentist, despite his parents’ best efforts.

Dentists, too, are outraged. Last year, Annette, a local dentist who has a superb surgery and has worked for the NHS her whole life, wrote to me in total despair. Her surgery has being working overtime to see NHS patients and to try to meet the unmet need—it has even overperformed on its targets to get the NHS to care for local people who desperately need it. She was doing that, but it got to the stage where her surgery was not being paid for NHS work due to errors and unexplained hold-ups in money. Just before Christmas, she said:

“At the end of next year I will have been a dentist for 50 years, always working on the NHS. I don’t think I have ever known it in such a bad state, nor for the Government to have so little care of its state.”

She is over-worked, under-compensated, exhausted and unable to keep up with demand, and she is not being paid for the work that she is doing. It is a terrible state of affairs.

We see a picture of underspent ICB dental budgets and massive unmet need. It is obvious that those things demonstrate a system that simply is not working. The Government know about this as well as we do and announced last April that there was going to be a plan, but we still have not seen one. If they care, where is their sense of urgency? They cannot say that our plan to put NHS dentistry in working order will not work when they will not bring forward their own plan. They must get on with it now. My Wallasey constituents are in pain, and I expect it to be alleviated.