Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make an estimate of the number of NHS dentistry appointments that were available in (a) Towcester, (b) Brackley, and (c) South Northamptonshire constituency in each year between 2018 and 2022.

The requested data is not available. In July 2022, we announced a package of improvements to the National Health Service dental system, detailed in ‘Our plan for patients’, which outlined the steps we are taking to meet oral health need and increase access to dental care across England. The changes we have implemented include ensuring dentists are renumerated fairly for more complex work, and greater flexibility to reallocate resources and to utilise dentists with greater capacity to deliver more NHS treatment, while enabling full use of the dental team.

These changes came into effect towards the end of 2022. However, we know that we need to do more and continue to build on these reforms. We will be announcing our plan for further reform of the NHS dental system later this year.

NHS England is holding further discussions with the British Dental Association and other stakeholders for additional reforms of the NHS Dental System planned to take place later in 2023.