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 publish a dental recovery plan.

We are currently working on a plan for dentistry, to be published shortly, to improve access to dental care across England. There are several fronts where we need to take further action to support and recover activity in National Health Service dentistry, to improve access to care for all ages.

Our plan for dentistry will build upon the first package of reforms agreed in July 2022, which included changes to banding and the introduction of a minimum Units of Dental Activity value, and the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan, which committed to increasing dentistry training places by 40% so that there are over 1,100 places by 2031/32.

Our plan will address how we continue to improve access, particularly for new patients, and how we make NHS work more attractive to ensure NHS dentists are incentivised to deliver more NHS care.