Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department plans to take to help tackle regional shortfalls in the provision of NHS dental care.

In July 2022, we announced a package of improvements to the National Health Service dental system, detailed in ‘Our plan for patients’, which outlined the steps we are taking to meet oral health need and increase access to dental care across all regions in England. These changes came into effect towards the end of 2022.

However, we know that we need to do more and continue to build on these reforms. We will announce our plan for further reform of the NHS dental system later this year, and it will include several areas requiring further action to support and recover activity in NHS dentistry, such as how to incentivise NHS dentists to deliver more NHS care.

From 1 April 2023, responsibility for commissioning primary care dentistry to meet the needs of the local population has been delegated to integrated care boards (ICBs) across England. NHS England has published an Assurance Framework which sets out its approach to providing assurance that commissioning functions are carried out safely and effectively by ICBs.