Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will list the integrated care boards that returned money for unfulfilled NHS dental care.

The Government wants to ensure that every penny we allocate for dentistry is spent on dentistry, and that the ringfenced dental budget is spent on the patients who need it most.

Changes to the contract already mean that commissioners can more easily redistribute ringfenced dentistry funding to ensure delivery of dental care, in scenarios where contractors are persistently unable to deliver their National Health Service commitments.

We have reduced the NHS dentistry underspend from £392 million in 2023/24 to £36 million in 2024/25. The following table shows the integrated care boards (ICBs) that returned dental allocation to NHS England in 2024/25: