Access to NHS Dentistry

Daisy Cooper Excerpts

Thursday 10th February 2022 Westminster Hall

[Daisy Cooper (St Albans) (LD)]

I, too, congratulate the hon. Members for Waveney (Peter Aldous) and for Bradford South (Judith Cummins) on securing this well-attended and important debate.

I want to relay some of the desperate accounts that have come from my constituents. One moved to St Alban’s with his fiancée in November 2020—15 months ago. They needed dental care and tried eight NHS dental practices in the area, but not one could add them even to the waiting list. They have checked with the practices every single month for the past 15 months and still no joy. My constituent’s fiancée has now registered with some student dentists at a hospital in London. She is desperate to get some treatment. The good news is that she is on the waiting list; the bad news is that it is still a very long waiting list.

Another constituent, a mother, has a very young daughter. The mother has spent two and a half years trying to get her daughter an appointment with a dentist. She wrote that she was surprised that NHS practices do not even have an obligation to take in children, especially when they have a dental issue. She herself has gum disease, which got worse during her pregnancy. She has had to spend all her savings and money to go private.

Another person who has been trying for ages to get a dentist appointment rang the NHS phone number, which tells people to call it if they cannot get an appointment. All the people there did was to search the websites for her, which she had already done. Their only advice was that she should wait until she was in agony and then call NHS 111. What kind of advice is that? It is unfair and counterproductive, and it costs the taxpayer more.

The local dentistry committee in Hertfordshire wrote to me. It had written to NHS England, along with the dental committees of Bedfordshire and Milton Keynes. They were begging for the payment system to be reformed. It is absurd that, if dentists carry out more work for their community than the outdated cap allows, they simply cannot be paid. That is an absolutely absurd system. Dentists are unable to provide the care that their patients need. The units of dental activity skew the dental system. It is now more attractive for practices to deal with less complex patients: in many cases, they are paid the same flat rate for such treatments as they would for helping those with higher needs.

The Local Dental Committees confederation has sent its plans to the Government and to many MPs, saying that the system has to be reformed. I sincerely hope the Minister will give us a better answer than the one I was given to my written parliamentary question earlier today, which simply confirmed that the system was being reviewed along with lots of other options. We need to hear more positive noises from the Minister this afternoon.

What needs to change? The Association of Dental Groups has made some recommendations on workforce. Some Members have alluded to those recommendations—the “six to fix”. The association talked, first, about the need for more training places here in the UK, which I am sure we all support. Secondly, it called for—some Members have not referenced this—the recognition of EU national dentists to be extended beyond the end of this year, when it will otherwise run out. Thirdly, the association has called for the UK to look at recruiting from countries that have a surplus of high-skilled dentists. Unfortunately, it appears to be news to some Members in the Chamber that we were always able to recruit from some of those countries, and it did not require Brexit to be able to do so.

I would like to put three questions to the Minister. First, when will my constituents be able to see a dentist? Secondly, when will this absurd payment system be scrapped and reformed? Thirdly, when will there be a workforce strategy so that dental deserts, which we have heard so much about, become a thing of the past and this Dickensian system of years-long waiting is finally brought to an end?