Dental Services: East of England

Debate between Dan Poulter and Richard Bacon

Tuesday 16th May 2023 Westminster Hall

[Mr Richard Bacon (South Norfolk) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered dental services in the East of England.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Mark. I am particularly pleased to have the opportunity to introduce this debate on dental services in the east of England, as I have been applying to Mr Speaker for a debate on the subject for several months. I am sure that I am not alone among hon. Members in finding that the subject of access to a dentist is one of the largest in my constituency postbag and inbox. It has been the topic of numerous Back-Bench debates in recent times. I pay particular tribute to the efforts of my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney (Peter Aldous) and the hon. Member for Bradford South (Judith Cummins), who have jointly sponsored a trio of debates in the last year or so, most recently on 27 April. My hon. Friend the Member for Broadland (Jerome Mayhew), who is also present, led an Adjournment debate on the need to establish a dental training college in East Anglia on 11 October last year. I will not say much more about that, but I ask the Minister to reconsider the Government’s position on it, because my hon. Friend made some very good points in that debate.

There have been many other interventions on many occasions by many hon. Members from both sides of the House. Indeed, another of my parliamentary neighbours, the hon. Member for Norwich South (Clive Lewis), secured question No. 1 in Prime Minister’s questions last week and asked about dentistry. He also managed to include a rather third-rate joke—something to do with rotten teeth and rotten Governments—but before he is tempted to repeat that, should he grace us with his presence, I point out to the House that I have a fourth-rate joke just for him. Colleagues may have noticed that the debate was scheduled to start, and indeed did start on time, at tooth-hurty pm.

Given the—[Laughter.] It got there eventually. That is Lincolnshire for you, Sir Mark. Given the enormous cost of dealing with the pandemic, and the inevitable financial consequences and constraints that it imposed, I think that the Government have done rather well, but that is not to say that they cannot do better. We all expect them to do better, as do our constituents. The Commons Health Committee has studied the reform of dental services and noted concerns that the Government have

“transferred financial risk from the NHS to dentists”,

adding:

“The fixed-term contract may make dentists reluctant to make long term investments in their practice.”

The Committee observed that the chief dental officer appeared in evidence to argue that if commissioners and dentists

“acted more flexibly and used common sense and good will the new arrangements would work”,

but it concluded that

“we see little evidence that this will happen.”

The Committee also reported that the total number of dentists working for the NHS and the activity that they have provided has fallen, and that the total number of patients seen by an NHS dentist has fallen by 900,000. The conclusion of the Health Committee was that the contract was

“failing to improve dental services measured by any of the criteria.”

If hon. Members find any of those conclusions eerily familiar, it would not surprise me, because they are from the Health Committee’s report in July 2008, when the Committee had a Labour majority and a Labour Chair, and there was a Labour Government. I hope that we can all agree that this is a long-standing problem that is not confined to any one Government or party.

There is widespread agreement that the dental contract introduced in 2006 lies at the root of many of the problems that we see today. The old item of service method that existed prior to the 2006 contract may have had some issues, but as one dentist said to me:

“It was a system that allowed you to be entrepreneurial”.

A dentist could set up a dental practice, put a sign outside and get on with it. Under the old NHS contract, dentists were paid for each item of treatment that they provided—an examination, a filling, a crown or a denture. Now they are paid per course of treatment, irrespective of how many items are provided, thus a course of treatment involving one filling attracts the same fee as one containing five fillings, a root treatment and an extraction. As the Duke of Norfolk is rumoured to have said about the rhythm method of contraception, there is only one problem: it “doesn’t bloody work”. We have had this problem since 2006. We have a contract that is, effectively, not fit for purpose.

In fairness, the problems go back beyond 2006. Indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney said in his last debate on the subject on 27 April:

“The fundamental causes of the collapse of NHS dentistry”

—I do not like saying that as a supporter of the Government, but I do not think the “collapse of NHS dentistry” is too extreme when we see what is happening; I hope that the Minister notes that—

“go back over 25 years with a gradual withdrawal of funding by successive Governments and the poorly thought-through 2006 NHS contract.”

My hon. Friend added:

“Covid was the final straw that brought the edifice crashing down.”—[Official Report, 27 April 2023; Vol. 731, c. 995.]

The problems in NHS dentistry have been so well canvassed in so many recent debates that I do not want to rehearse them again. I will, however, reprise one story from my constituency. The Manor House dental practice in Long Stratton in South Norfolk was run for many years by a respected and successful dentist called Dr Mark Ter-Berg, who, after many years of service, retired and sold his practice. After a period, the new managers of the practice got into financial difficulty and the business went under, owing money both to its corporate owners and the NHS. Dr Ter-Berg offered to come out of retirement and take over his old practice. He was quoted as saying in a local newspaper:

“You would have thought that”—

NHS England—

would have bitten my hand off”.

After months of making the offer and getting nowhere, I intervened on his behalf with NHS England, but it did not make much difference.

Dr Ter-Berg finally gave up waiting and decided instead to set up an entirely separate new dental practice in Long Stratton. I drove past it the other day, and there was a sign that read, “Open from 4 May”. I spoke to him yesterday and he is now very busy. He does not have an NHS dental contract; it is all private work and he is extremely busy—and Long Stratton is not by any means the most prosperous part of my constituency.

As Allison Pearson wrote on 10 August 2022 in The Daily Telegraph, which is not a notable bastion of left-wing journalism:

“I can’t think of a better example of a two-tier NHS than the one that currently exists in dentistry.”

Indeed, I understand that the providers of dental plans—for example, Practice Plan, which styles itself

“the UK’s leading provider of practice-branded dental membership plans to help you leave NHS dentistry or switch providers”—

are so busy that they are rushed off their feet.

Colleagues will have seen the British Dental Association briefing for this debate, which references a much-reported BBC investigation showing that no dental practice in Norfolk, Suffolk or Cambridge was taking on new adult NHS patients, and that this was also true of nearly all dental practices in Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Essex. At the end of March, Bupa announced that it will close many dental practices across the country; 85 practices were to be affected, with 38 set to close immediately. That includes two in Norfolk, with one in Harleston in my South Norfolk constituency—although I understand that Bupa is hoping to sell that practice to a new owner and that it will not close on 30 June as previously expected. The truth is that successive Governments have made NHS dentistry a place where dentists increasingly do not want to work. We need to focus on that, and we would all like to know what the Minister will do about it.

Let me say a word about money. The thing that struck me most in preparing for this debate was how little money the NHS spends on dentistry—indeed, how little is spent on dentistry at all compared with what it spends on other things. The figure is currently about £3.2 billion a year—that fluctuates a bit—and about 20% to 32% of that is actually paid through patient charges, paid by the patients themselves.

A recent National Audit Office study showed NHS spending rising from £123.7 billion in the financial year that ended in 2020 up to £151.8 billion—more or less £152 billion—at the end of the financial year that just finished. Further big rises are expected and planned—going up to £162.6 billion—by the end of the financial year 2025. Those are huge sums. In comparison, the annual cost of dentistry is tiny. I tend to compare anything under £3 billion with the NHS national programme for IT in the health service—one of the less successful parts of the last Labour Government. The Health Committee and the Public Accounts Committee studied that extensively at the time, and showed that the electronic patient record element, which cost £2.7 billion, had achieved basically nothing. The Public Accounts Committee’s report—this was its third report on the issue—from around August 2011 stated:

“The Department is unable to show what has been achieved for the £2.7 billion spent to date on care records systems.”

In other words, that nearly £3 billion achieved precisely nothing. I know that this is not quite comparable, being an annual number, but talk of a few hundred million or a couple of billion pounds means a few failed Government computer projects, in terms of the quantum. Compared with the £124 billion or £152 billion or £160-something billion that we are talking about, £2 billion or £3 billion here or there is of very little account.

I am sure that the Minister will refer to the fact that the Government are aware they need to reform NHS dentistry and that he is working on a plan. Some hon. Members might press him for a date on that plan, but I will not do that. I am much more concerned about ensuring that, when he gets the plan, it is right. I do not think it is any one Government’s responsibility that this has gone wrong. In fairness to the Labour Government of the mid-00s, in 2006, they were trying to correct what they thought was a big problem—that the item of service method led to a bill that was difficult to control. It was more akin to annually managed expenditure in the social security Department.

[Dr Dan Poulter (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making some very good points, and I congratulate him on securing the debate. He will recognise that there is a tension between payment by activity, which is not necessarily a desirable way to manage health—be that dental or physical health—and moving towards a more preventive model, which was the aim, if not the reality, of the changes to the 2006 contract and subsequent changes. What does he think about finding a way to lock in dentists to the NHS for maybe five years, post-graduation, to ensure that they pay back some of the training that cost the taxpayer many hundreds of thousands of pounds?

[Mr Bacon]

My hon. Friend makes several good points. We did payment by activity for acute hospitals, and we got a huge amount of activity in acute hospitals. Mental health was then the Cinderella service, with what little was left. Of course, there are tensions, and my hon. Friend, as a practising hospital doctor, will know that better than most. How that needle can be threaded to get the desired results has confronted Governments for many years.

On my hon. Friend’s specific point, having gone through medical school or dental school and come out the other end, junior doctors and, I am sure, junior dentists are at the moment struggling in the way that many others are—including young professionals—to afford anywhere to live. We have hundreds of thousands of acres of public land, including Ministry of Defence land, NHS land, railway land and church land, which has a quasi-public flavour to it. Norfolk County Council alone owns 16,000 acres of land. I would say to these people, “Come and work for the NHS for a few years full time. Commit yourselves completely to this, and we will help you design, build and rent from us at a decent rent. And then, depending on the calibrated loyalty package, which I am sure we can easily work out, you will get the chance in future to buy the house that you have designed for yourself.”

To go back to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Broadland has made, getting people to stay in a particular area has proved difficult, not least because we do not have a dental training college. However, this is also about people understanding that the area they are going to work in is particularly attractive. That is true of much of the east of England, except people do not realise it because not enough of them, certainly in dentistry, are educated there. There is a huge opportunity for the Government to get this right, and I am more concerned about ensuring that the plan that comes from the Minister in the next few weeks or months is correct.

The fear I have is the potential downside. My constituent who, before Christmas, booked an appointment for her children for 9 May but found out recently that it was cancelled in a text message from the Harleston Bupa practice—she has been phoning to find out what is going on—will not care or know about the interstices of the 2006 dental contract, which was perhaps well intentioned but is deeply flawed and has led to many of the problems we are grappling with. She will just care that she cannot get an appointment.

Although the Opposition have not been particularly fleet of foot in recent years, even they can see that this will become a very salient issue at the next general election. We have our five points: halving inflation, growing the economy, reducing the national debt, cutting NHS waiting times and stopping the boats. Those are fine, but they are not a programme for Government. We need to do those things to restore confidence after the events of last autumn and—it might be best if I quote Mark Twain—to try and draw a veil and hope that not too many people remember them. However, the fact is that we need a better programme for the election, and I am sure we will have one.

The hon. Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) will be sitting there with his chums, thinking, “What are our five points going to be?” If we do not get this right—mark my words, Sir Mark—the Opposition parties will say, “They have had 13 years to talk about it. It started with the 2006 dental contract, but they have had long enough and have not yet sorted it.” It will then become one of their five points. We are talking about such piffling sums of money compared with the overall cost of the NHS that it is simply incomprehensible that we would not deal with this properly.

The issue of dental care has been of growing concern to our constituents for many years, and the concern has only grown as successive Governments have failed to grapple with the issues properly. On present trends, it will continue to get worse—much worse—unless the Government make a decisive step change and match that decision with the right resources in the right places within a contractual framework that incentivises the right behaviour. That is what the Government need to do.