NHS Dentists: South-West England

Robert Syms Excerpts

Wednesday 24th May 2023 Westminster Hall

[Sir Robert Syms (Poole) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder), who set out not only the problems but some of the solutions to the crisis in NHS dentistry, and my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax) reinforced his arguments.

If one is honest, there has never been an ideal NHS system. Before covid, people still needed a degree of luck and persistence to find an NHS dentist, but one of the main impacts of covid was to create a crisis in dentistry that was not there before. There is a massive backlog and a lot of people are leaving the profession. It is certainly one of those issues that needs to be higher on the political agenda.

The Government have already done one or two things to help. The changes to the annual allowance and lifetime allowance for professionals, particularly those in dentistry, will keep more people in the profession. We need a short-term and a longer-term plan to increase the number of people in the profession. Most of my hon. Friends have come up with solutions. My hon. Friend the Member for Torbay (Kevin Foster) said that we need to train more people, not just generally in the national health service but in dentistry.

We have a common problem. Parents find it difficult to find NHS dentists for their children. I get a lot of emails from pregnant women in Poole and those with special care needs who tell me that, because a number of NHS practices have packed up, they are shuttling around trying to find treatment that is not there.

Like my colleagues, I think the Government need to speed up the dental recovery plan to give those who at the moment are not getting treatment some hope of better times ahead. That is the short-term solution. In the long term, we will simply have to spend more to train people in the dental profession and raise the cap on dental schools. About 20 years ago—not too long after I was first elected—there was a proposal for Southampton to have a dental school, and the rationale for that was that dentists tend to stay in the area they train. That did not go through because the Blair Government decided not to go ahead, but I am interested in the proposals for a dental school in Dorset. We need more in the south-west of England so that people come in, train, like the communities they are living in and stay.

In our inboxes, we get a sense of our constituents’ urgency. There are people in need of treatment, so we need fundamental reforms and possibly some additional money from the Government. I know the Government and local health authorities are looking at this issue seriously. There is no magic bullet, but the sooner we get proposals from the Government to start to recover the situation, the better it will be for my constituents who are struggling to get the services they thought they would be provided with.