Access to NHS Dentistry

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi Excerpts

Thursday 10th February 2022 Westminster Hall

[Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Efford. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I thank the hon. Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) and my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford South (Judith Cummins) for securing this important debate and the Backbench Business Committee for ensuring valuable parliamentary time is dedicated to the issue.

I place on record my gratitude to dentists, nurses, technicians, hygienists and all those who have worked in dental practices across our country, and in particular in my Slough constituency, over the pandemic, continuing to serve people throughout such uncertainty and disruption as best they could.

As hon. Members know, although clinics were not shut for long, the ongoing repercussions nearly two years later have been astronomical. An estimated 38 million appointments were missed during the pandemic. Despite best efforts, such as opening more than 600 urgent dental hubs and staff working overtime on weekends and evenings, achieving a pre-pandemic level of service has certainly not happened for my Slough constituents, with nearly two thirds of practices estimating that they are continuing to operate at less than 70% of pre-covid capacity.

[Rushanara Ali in the Chair]

Returning to so-called normal was never going to be straightforward, but the chronic lack of support for dentists now and prior to the pandemic is taking its toll. As hon. Members have eloquently highlighted, shockingly, Government spending on NHS dentistry has decreased by more than a third in the past decade. As with other health services, we cannot allow Government to use covid as a smokescreen for what was already a decimated profession.

In the five years before the start of the pandemic, the number of practices providing NHS dentistry fell by 1,253. In December 2021, a survey showed the true toll that has taken on dentists, with more than 40% planning a change of career or retirement over the next year. Tory cuts have consequences, and the pandemic has drastically revealed them.

Since the reopening of practices, I have been contacted by dentists concerned about meeting their targets without adequate support, and patients waiting months, sometimes years, to be seen. The long-term lack of support has created a double-edged sword, failing both patients and practitioners, so I welcome the Government’s recently announced funding, which I hope will achieve their aims of securing 350,000 extra dental appointments, particularly for more vulnerable groups. We are the only country in the UK that failed to provide such support until now, so I fear that it is too little too late. As with all catch-up plans, we need to listen to those who are impacted.

Following the announcement, the British Dental Association noted:

“After a decade of cuts, a cash-starved service risks being offered money that can’t be spent. Hard-pressed practices are working against the clock and many will struggle to find capacity ahead of April for this investment to make a difference.”

I have seen that happening for constituents who contact me: the waiting list for appointments in Slough is more than a year long, orthodontist referrals go back to 2018, and patients are asked to go private if they wish to receive any treatment promptly, paying hundreds of pounds just to be pain-free. That situation is sadly going to get worse, as more than half of dentists state that they are likely to reduce their NHS commitments because they are overworked and undervalued. Is this privatisation by stealth?

The managed decline of Britain’s public services, overseen and supervised by this Conservative Government, has to stop. We all know who will lose out if it continues: the most vulnerable in our society, particularly young people. If we do not properly address this now, we lay the path for a litany of future health issues for children and young people. In my Slough constituency, which is officially the youth capital of Britain as it has the lowest average age of any town or city in our country, this will be devastating. In 2019, 41.5% of five-year-olds in Slough suffered from tooth decay, compared with the national average of 23%, and often required general anaesthetic to remove the impacted teeth, leading to other health risks and impacting their education through missed school days.

Even prior to the covid pandemic, tooth decay was the No. 1 reason for hospital admissions among young people, with a waiting list of a year being standard for the procedure. We already know the disproportionate impact that the pandemic has had on certain groups, including older people; people living in deprived areas; black, Asian and minority ethnic groups; and the most vulnerable groups in our society.

Sadly, that impact has extended into dentistry. NHS England and the Office of the Chief Dental Officer have highlighted that

“Evidence suggests that existing health inequalities have been compounded by COVID-19…The long-term economic impact of the pandemic is likely to further exacerbate oral health inequalities.”

If dentistry moves towards a privatised model, or patients simply cannot be seen due to NHS demand, that widens and entrenches inequalities in our society and, in the long term, it doubles pressure on the NHS for avoidable treatments. Our NHS dentistry should function on the founding principle on which it was created: being accessible for all, regardless of one’s ability to pay.