Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the potential impact of levels of provision of dental services on (a) children’s and (b) adults' oral health.

The recently published Adult Oral Health Survey 2023 provides the first picture of adult oral health in England for more than a decade. This shows that among dentate adults, those with at least one natural tooth, over two-fifths, or 41%, showed evidence of obvious decay and 9% had one or more potentially urgent dental conditions. Similarly, the Oral Health Survey for five-year-olds in 2024 indicates that 22.4%, or more than a fifth, of five-year-old schoolchildren had experience of obvious tooth decay.

The Government is focussed on the prevention of poor dental health through our supervised toothbrushing programme to reach up to 600,000 children in the 20% most deprived areas of England, and by expanding community water fluoridation to the North East of England. This intervention will reach an additional 1.6 million people and will reduce tooth decay and inequalities in dental health, particularly in children and vulnerable adults.

We are committed to delivering fundamental reform of the dental contract before the end of this Parliament. As a first step, on 16 December we published the Government’s response to the public consultation on interim improvements to the National Health Service dental contract. The changes will be introduced from April 2026. These reforms will put patients with greatest need first, incentivising urgent care and complex treatments. Further information is available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/nhs-dentistry-contract-quality-and-payment-reforms/outcome/government-response-to-consultation-on-nhs-dentistry-contract-quality-and-payment-reforms