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 increase the availability of dental services where NHS dentists do not have capacity to provide treatment.

Over 700 dental practices continue to provide additional urgent services across the country to support the provision of urgent care, where a patient does not have or cannot access their own dentist.

In order to increase availability of dental services, National Health Service dentists have been asked to maximise safe throughput to meet as many prioritised needs as possible, focussing first on urgent care and vulnerable groups followed by overdue appointments. This has been underpinned, taking into account current infection prevention and control guidelines, by the requirement for dental providers to deliver 60% of normal activity volumes for the first six months of 2021/22 for full payment of their NHS contractual value.