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 average waiting time for child orthodontic treatment; and what steps he is taking to reduce waiting times for that treatment.

No such assessment has been made. Data on National Health Service orthodontic waiting times is not available at a national level due to regional variation in the collection of data.

Contractual arrangements for the first six months of the 2021/22 financial year have been communicated to practices by NHS England and NHS Improvement. NHS orthodontists have been asked to maximise safe throughput to meet as many prioritised needs as possible. A revised unit of orthodontic activity threshold has been set at 80% for full payment of NHS contractual value, based on data that indicates practices have capacity to safely achieve more activity than in the final quarter of 2020/21. It is expected that this increased threshold will improve patient throughput and reduce waiting times for treatment.