Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of the potential impact of an underspend in the primary dentistry budget on the availability of dentistry services.

We have assessed the utilisation of underspends in National Health Service dentistry budgets on NHS dentistry services. NHS England has provided guidance for integrated care boards (ICBs) that requires dental funding to be ringfenced, with any unused resources re-directed to improve NHS dental access in the first instance. A schedule setting out the dental ringfence has been issued to ICBs. NHS England’s 2023/24 revenue finance and contracting guidance, which provides more detail, is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/2023-24-revenue-finance-and-contracting-guidance/