Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to improve access to NHS dentistry in South Shropshire constituency.

Integrated care boards (ICBs) are responsible for commissioning primary care services, including National Health Service dentistry, to meet the needs of the local population. For the South Shropshire constituency, this is the Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin ICB.

The Government is committed to ensuring that people can access urgent dental care when they need it. Over the past year, ICBs have been commissioning additional urgent dental appointments and there is now an urgent care safety net available in all areas of the country. 1.8 million additional courses of National Health Service dental treatment have been delivered in the seven months between April to October 2025 compared to the corresponding months prior to the general election.

We are committed to delivering fundamental reform of the dental contract before the end of this Parliament. From April 2026, we began introducing a package of reforms to address some of the pressing issues that dentists and dental teams have been experiencing.

These reforms will prioritise those with the greatest need, shifting care away from clinically unnecessary check-ups.

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. We have reduced the NHS dentistry underspend from £392 million in 2023/24 to £36 million in 2024/25.