Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what additional funding is being made available for NHS dentistry to support the additional payments for emergency treatment announced on 15 December 2025.

The Government is implementing payment and quality reforms to the dental contract from April 2026, which will support dentists to prioritise those with the greatest need, shifting care away from clinically unnecessary check-ups and instead incentivising more complex and urgent care.

The 2026 reforms are funded within the existing National Health Service dentistry budget, and in 2024/25 we invested approximately £3.7 billion on primary care dentistry.

We want to ensure that every penny we allocate for dentistry is spent on dentistry, and that the ringfenced dental budget is spent on the patients who need it most.