No progress in resolving long-standing NHS dental contract issues - Yorkshire Post Letters

I read your report of Health Secretary Victoria Atkins’ speech on the recovery plan with interest. Availability of NHS dentistry was a disgrace long before the pandemic; but it’s only now, with an impending general election, that the plan has appeared.

The contract for dentists to do NHS work has long been the central issue. It doesn’t cover the full cost to the dentist of doing NHS work. There are caps on how many NHS patients a dentist can see and how many procedures they can carry out in a year. No wonder so many dentists now choose not to see NHS patients – the number doing NHS work is the lowest since 2012. Funding is also an issue - in real terms the NHS dentistry budget of £3bn represents a cut of £1bn since 2010.

There’s some tinkering at the edges; but the British Dental Association says the so called recovery plan falls woefully short of resolving the problems. Contrary to Sunak’s claim, there is no new money, just a ‘rearranging of the deckchairs on the Titanic’. Most fundamentally there is absolutely no progress in resolving those long-standing contract issues.

There’s also a massive amount that should be done to prevent tooth decay – the level of which in children has shown a disastrous rise in the last 15 years. Fluoridation of drinking water carries huge benefits, but successive Tory governments have dragged their feet on facilitating its extension to the whole of England. Similarly, the recent government cop-out on implementation of the 2020 National Food Strategy means children are still consuming far too much tooth-rotting sugar and fizzy drinks.

A pioneering Labour government introduced NHS dentistry in 1948 with huge benefits to dental health. It’s high time for a Labour government to rescue the NHS from the terminal decline which the Tories have presided over.