A Plan for the NHS and Social Care

Paul Beresford Excerpts

Wednesday 19th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Sir Paul Beresford (Mole Valley) (Con) [V]]

Mr Deputy Speaker, with your ceiling of three minutes, I am going to focus on one aspect of one Bill—namely, the proposal to change the approach to the fluoridation of community water supplies. I am a dentist and a member of the British Fluoridation Society. It is therefore with considerable enthusiasm that I support the proposed change of the procedure for introducing fluoridation of domestic water supplies. Our western nation comparators have between 60% and 80% of their domestic water supplies fluoridated. This country has a shameful 10%.

When I first came to this country as an ethnic minority immigrant, I worked in the national health service in a deprived area of London. I was appalled by the general state of my patients’ teeth, particularly by the state of children’s teeth. Trying to maintain children’s dentition was and still is, as a colleague put it, like trying to fill a bath with the plug out. Far and away the biggest reason for referral of children for general anaesthetics to hospitals in England is to remove rotten teeth. In 2019, hospitals throughout England carried out an average of 177 operations a day on children and teenagers, just removing decayed, rotten and abscessed teeth that should not be in that state. The annual cost is more than £40 million.

Tooth decay is essentially highly preventable. Water fluoridation is the single most effective public measure that could be taken to prevent tooth decay. Implementation of fluoridation is in the powers of the local authority, but little progress has been made since that was introduced in 2013. The costs are to local councils and the cost benefits are to the national health service. The process of consultation is lengthy and tedious, and it is enabling a platform for protestors of the same genre of the anti-vaccination people.

On a more practical point, there are considerable difficulties for both the local authorities and the water companies in that their boundaries are rarely, if ever, coterminous. It makes eminent sense for the implementation process for new schemes of fluoridation to be put in the hands of and driven by central Government. In doing so, I hope the Government will curtail the procedures on consultation, as they only permit continuous reception and repetition of scaremongering stories from people who are basically cranks.

The safety, efficiency, cost-effectiveness and benefits of fluoridated water supplies, whether natural—and they are in many parts of the world—or as an additive, have been proven worldwide for what must be approaching 100 years. With this proposed step and Government determination, rather than lagging behind the rest of the world, we could actually lead.