Nigel Mills
Main Page: Nigel Mills (Conservative - Amber Valley)Department Debates - View all Nigel Mills's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(3 years, 9 months ago)
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Matt Hancock
I will not allow a divisive approach to tackling this crisis. We will all work together. We will work together with local authorities, local Mayors and local areas, and we will do that in Manchester and across the board. I just hope that the hon. Lady will take the message back to Manchester about how keen we are to work collegiately and together. That is the right way forward.
I have already answered the question on thresholds for changes to local lockdowns. We have to apply judgment. Again, we do this in consultation with and working hand in glove with the local area. On the point about data, the hon. Lady might want to have a word with her friend, the shadow Secretary of State, because he was right to acknowledge that the sharing of this sort of data, which is a complicated task, is constantly improving.
Nigel Mills (Amber Valley) (Con) [V]
Is there more that we can do to help dental practices that are struggling with the need to see fewer patients and with increased costs to provide all the PPE? Many local dental practices are telling me that they will struggle to survive until they get back to normal volumes if they cannot get some help with the increased costs.
Matt Hancock
My hon. Friend raises a really important point. PPE is a significant extra cost right across the health and care system. Dentists who are on NHS contracts have of course had those contracts paid throughout, even when routine dentistry was not open. I am really glad that we have now managed to get routine dentistry open. We are working with dentists and their representatives to ensure that we tackle the real-world challenge of having high-quality and safe dentistry while ensuring that dental practices can also be financially sustainable. It is a challenging problem and I pay tribute to the dentists who are working with us on it.