Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if she will make an estimate of the number of patients who have not seen a dentist in the last two years; and how many additional appointments does she expect her dentistry recovery plan to provide.

We want to encourage all professionals to commit more of their time to National Health Service work and to work in areas of the country with a low provision of NHS dental care, which is why we have brought in the Golden Hello scheme, which will deliver over 400,000 appointments.

The Dentistry Recovery Plan will make dental services faster, simpler and fairer for patients and will fund approximately 2.5 million additional appointments, or more than 1.5 million additional courses of dental treatment. The plan sets out a number of actions which will improve access for patients, by helping the sector to recover activity more quickly, address underlying issues, and set out the action needed for longer term reform of the system.

We have also announced that we will raise the minimum units of dental activity (UDA) value to £28. This will mean that almost 1,000 contracts will see an uplift to their UDA rate this year, supporting them and making treatment of NHS patients more sustainable.