Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate he has made of the number of NHS dentists who are not able to accept new patients in the 10 (a) most deprived and (b) least deprived areas of England in each of the last 10 years for which information is available.

Dental practices capacity to take on new patients varies but all practices are periodically able to take on new patients as existing patients move on. Because practices may regularly open and close to new patients over the period of a year it is not possible to estimate in the format requested the numbers unable to accept new patients.