Access to NHS Dentistry

Jerome Mayhew Excerpts

Thursday 10th February 2022 Westminster Hall

[Jerome Mayhew (Broadland) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate. I, too, want to give my congratulations to the hon. Member for Bradford South (Judith Cummins) as well as my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous). One of the great advantages to speaking late on in a debate is that we can jettison all the interesting facts and figures we have carefully researched in preparation for a speech like this, because they have all been mentioned several times already. I want to focus instead on providing the Minister with some local feedback from my constituency of Broadland, so that she, when deliberating on how best to improve the dental contract and provision for all our constituents, can hear from the horse’s mouth the nuances that are experienced in Broadland and Norfolk and Waveney more widely.

Of all healthcare issues, dentistry is the most prominent in my inbox week after week. It is not just about the ability to register to get initial access, it is about getting dental work completed. I have a huge list of constituents’ casework, which I am not going to bring to Members’ attention, save for one, which gives a flavour of the seriousness of the missing treatment. A constituent of mine had two fillings fall out, which is a fairly common experience. She was unable to get any dental treatment to deal with that, so she ended up having to ring 111. She was told that, because of the lack of dental provision in the county of Norfolk, she was encouraged to do a DIY filling—that was by 111.

Every day is a school day in this job. I now understand that using the wax from Babybel cheeses is the way to perform a DIY filling recovery. Should we be in that sort of position? I, for one, think we should not. There are all sorts of examples I could have shared with Members. I want to drive home the real impact. For whatever reason, we are in the position we are now; some of it is covid, but a lot of it is not. We must, as a Government, address it in support of all of our constituents, however they voted.

I also have feedback from dentists. I have the honour of representing a fantastic town called Fakenham, which has been referred to already. One of the two NHS dentists announced a few months ago that she was no longer accepting NHS patients and that she was going private. I rang her up to find out what was the reason behind it. She is a very decent woman, who has worked tirelessly for the community of Fakenham for many years. What she said to me was not primarily about money. It was actually about the way she was treated by her NHS managers, which caused her frustration that reached such a pitch that she thought, “Stuff it. I am not putting up with this any longer.”

One thing that the dentist referred to that particularly stuck in my mind was that even a year ago, she had a person she could talk to directly as part of her management team; when there was a problem, she could ring up and talk to someone. That call was replaced by an email. She said that she had emailed every week for the previous 12 weeks about a really serious issue and she had not even had a reply. If we treat professional providers in that offhand way, can we be surprised that they decide to move to private provision? That is an option that every single NHS dentist has, and they have been voting with their feet.

I have already mentioned that this is not primarily about money—at least not in this instance—but I welcome the £50 million of additional spending that the Department has announced, and the 350,000 further treatments that that is apparently going to provide. I also very much welcome the decision by the Department to award a new contract for dentistry for Fakenham, because it is the largest town in my constituency and we were down to a single NHS provider. However, as has already been mentioned, I think by my hon. Friend the Member for North West Norfolk (James Wild), we have not been able to entice any dentist to take up that contract, even though the money is available.

Why is that? Why is it that a fantastic town such as Fakenham, which is a brilliant place to live, 5 miles from the gorgeous north Norfolk coast, with a really lovely quality of life and relatively low housing costs—it is a great place; it has its own racecourse—

[Duncan Baker]

And a good golf course.

[Jerome Mayhew]

It also has a good golf course—I thank my hon. Friend and neighbour. It is genuinely a really gorgeous town, so why is it that it cannot attract anyone to take on the NHS dentistry contract that is available? As my hon. Friends have pointed out, one of the reasons is that we have no training facility—not just in Norfolk or Suffolk, or even in Cambridgeshire or Bedfordshire; the nearest is in London. People have to go up to Birmingham or to London.

When we are trying to persuade young dentists to set out on their professional life in a certain place, moving to a rural or small town is not automatically attractive to them. We have to encourage people via training, and we know from our experience with the medical provision at the University of East Anglia and the Norfolk medical training in Norwich that someone is much more likely to stick around afterwards in the place where they train, because they have established relationships, they have contacts in the community—and, frankly, they know what great places Fakenham and other parts of Broadland are. One of the primary reasons I wanted to speak today was to encourage the Minister to consider the provision of a dental training facility in the east of England.

I will leave it to others who are much more professional than I am to comment on how we properly reform the 2006 NHS contract, save for saying that we need to treat dentists with respect. It is not all about money; it is about how we treat people. And please can we have some training in Norfolk?