Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps her Department is taking to (a) increase availability of and (b) reduce waiting times for dental appointments.

On 7 February, we published Our Plan to Recover and Reform National Health Service Dentistry. The Dentistry Recovery Plan will make dental services faster, simpler, and fairer for patients and will fund around 2.5 million additional appointments.

The Plan sets out a number of actions which will improve access for patients, by helping the sector to recover activity more quickly, including the introduction of a New Patient Payment Premium of up to £50 for each new patient. This is on top of the funding dental practices already receive for delivering that care.

We will further incentivise dentists to do more NHS work by raising the minimum Units of Dental Activity (UDA) rate to £28.

From 1 April 2023 responsibility for commissioning primary care dentistry to meet the needs of the local population has been delegated to all integrated care boards (ICBs) across England. ICBs are responsible for having local processes in place to identify areas of need and determine the priorities for investment.