Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what progress his Department has made on access to dental care under Our Plan for Patients.

On 25 November 2022, the Department introduced legislation to amend the National Health Service dental contract to incentivise dentists to deliver care to high needs patients through fairer remuneration. The legislation requires NHS dentists to update their NHS.UK profiles more frequently to ensure patients can access accurate information on the services available. The Department will enable NHS England’s commissioners to more flexibly commission additional care for patients where this can be delivered by NHS dental teams.

NHS England has introduced minimum Unit of Dental Activity values of £23 to support NHS dentists with historically low value contracts and improve variation in contract values in England. The Department and NHS England aim to diversify the range of professionals available in NHS dentistry.