I have been working with the national charity Dentaid. They provide free dental services to people on low incomes or in areas which are struggling. I have been working with them to secure funding for them to offer services in my constituency, because I know there are so many people who would benefit from this service. However, despite my best efforts, this is unlikely to materialise soon but I am keeping a dialogue doing with them and should I hear anything, I will of course post any updates.
An NHS Dentist privately told me almost a year ago now that there were no NHS Dentist places in all of Lancashire – a truly horrifying statement which has been confirmed by a BBC Investigation. To be blunt, dentistry in England has been a mess for quite some time and the Government has simply sat on their hands. In the last election, I was proud to stand on a manifesto which would have scrapped dental costs and improved NHS dentistry so that more people could access it. It was gutting that my Party did not win enough seats to implement this but I have continued to campaign on this issue.
I have written to Ministers consistently over the past year or so about this growing issue of dentist capacity, in reply to which they repeatedly acknowledged the problem but promised little action to improve this capacity going forward.
As the issue noticeably started to grow last autumn, I tabled several formal questions to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, asking him what he is doing to improve access to dentists, and particularly to better incentivise dental practices to provide NHS, rather than private, treatment. Unfortunately the answers I received, which you can read here and here, were disappointing. They were little more than warm words, and in reminding me that urgent treatment still exists in an emergency, they highlight precisely the problem – that the more we are reliant on only emergency A&E treatment, the worse our overall dental health is becoming.
To try and get a straight and direct answer, I questioned the then Chancellor Rishi Sunak in the House of Commons – noting that several years ago he complained about the lack of dentists in his own constituency, but now he holds the purse strings and can do something about it – but rather than make a commitment to new investment in NHS dentists, he instead sent a junior minister to give me a meaningless answer. Unsatisfied, I raised this again at Prime Minister’s Questions in the hope that the PM would not be able to duck the question. In answering, he simply repeated the lie that the NHS, including NHS dentistry, has “received record funding” – in fact, not a penny of the NHS catch up funding was allocated to dentistry.
I have raised this with the Government in every way I can, and yet it remains clear that there is no plan, and that Lancashire is continuing to be let down by this Government.
However, I am not giving up, and I am continuing to put pressure on them on this, because I know the real impact that the lack of NHS dentists is having on local people such as yourself every day. I discussed this on BBC Radio Lancashire, and I will keep drawing attention to it, in Parliament, in the media and anywhere else I can.
To put it bluntly, there are fundamentally not enough places and the Government has continued to fail to invest in NHS dentistry. To highlight quite how bad things have got, the BBC recently reported on a Ukrainian refugee who returned to Ukraine to access a dentist, because there were none available here. This is absurd on so many levels.