Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to roll out (a) fluoride optimisation in water supplies and (b) other preventative measures to improve oral health.

In ‘Advancing our health; Prevention in the 2020s’, the Government committed to consulting on rolling out a supervised toothbrushing scheme in more pre-school and primary school settings in England, and to exploring ways of removing the funding barriers to fluoridating water, a clinically effective intervention to improve oral health, to encourage more local areas that are interested to come forward with proposals.

Public Health England has published several toolkits including a supervised toothbrushing and water fluoridation toolkit to support the commissioning and delivery of these programmes. These toolkits are available at the following links:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/improving-oral-health-supervised-tooth-brushing-programme-toolkit

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/improving-oral-health-community-water-fluoridation-toolkit

This sits alongside local authorities’ responsibilities for bringing forward oral health-based interventions for the general population, as needed in their local areas.