Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if her Department will make an assessment of the potential merits of offering incentives to dentists to deliver NHS dentistry.

We invest more than £3 billion each year to deliver National Health Service dentistry, and we have already introduced reforms designed to incentivise practices to deliver more dental care. These include increasing the amount of money that practices receive for high-need patients and allowing dentists to carry out more than their usual contracted NHS work. This has had the effect of more patients being seen, and a 23% increase in NHS activity in the past year.

We are working on our Dentistry Recovery Plan which will be published shortly and will address how we will continue to improve access, particularly for new patients, and how we will make NHS work more attractive to ensure NHS dentists are incentivised to deliver NHS care.