Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to her Oral Statement of 7 February 2024 on NHS Dentistry: Recovery and Reform, Official Report, columns 251-253, whether she has made an estimate of the impact of the announcement to offer additional payments for check-ups and new patients on the number of new dental surgeries that will be established in each of the next five years.

The Dentistry Recovery Plan will make dental services faster, simpler, and fairer for patients and will fund approximately two and a half million additional appointments, or more than one and a half million additional courses of dental treatment. As part of the plan, we will launch a new Golden Hello scheme for dentists who want to move to areas which persistently struggle to attract dentists into National Health Service work. The scheme will provide an extra two and a half million appointments, with 20,000 to be offered per dentist, for up to 240 dentists over three years.

We recognise that some commissioners will also be looking to commission new dentistry capacity to support under-served areas. We will support integrated care boards to ensure they understand how commissioning teams can encourage development of their local provider market, and to identify what further support they may need to develop new capacity, where they would otherwise be dependent on existing contractors and facilities to deliver improvements in access.