Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment he has made of the implications for his policies of trends in the levels of delivery of Units of Dental Activity by NHS Dentists in (a) Huddersfield, (b) Kirklees and (c) West Yorkshire.

The following table shows the number of Units of Dental Activity (UDAs) delivered over the past three financial years for Kirklees and West Yorkshire Integrated Care Board (ICB). Data for Kirklees includes data for Huddersfield which is not published separately.

The pandemic is likely to have had an impact on the UDAs delivered for 2019/20 and 2020/21.

In September 2022, we announced ‘Our plan for patients’ which sets out how we will meet oral health needs and increase access to National Health Service dental care in England whilst making the NHS dental contract more attractive to dental practices to support the delivery of commissioned dental activity. These changes have been implemented, including through regulations that came into effect on 25 November 2022. This includes enabling commissioning of up to 110% of contracted UDAs to increase NHS care from December 2022. NHS England is holding further discussions with the British Dental Association and other stakeholders for further reform later this year.

On 29 March 2021, NHS England published a flexible commissioning toolkit for regional commissioners. Flexible commissioning is an element of existing NHS dental contracts that enables UDA to be better targeted towards priority and high needs groups of patients. NHS England is continuing to monitor the use of the arrangements to meet local needs.