Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what her Department's expected timescales are for integrated care boards to report on how much of their dental funding allocation they have used in the 2023-24 financial year; what estimate her Department has made of how much of the total allocation (a) has been and (b) is forecast to be spent on (i) other priorities and (ii) returned to NHS England; and if she will make it her policy to rollover any underspend in the primary dentistry budget to create more NHS dental appointments.

NHS England has provided guidance for integrated care boards (ICBs) that requires dental funding to be ringfenced, with any unused resources re-directed to improve dental access in the National Health Service in the first instance. A schedule setting out the dental ringfence has been issued to ICBs. NHS England’s 2023/24 revenue finance and contracting guidance, which provides more detail, is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/2023-24-revenue-finance-and-contracting-guidance/

ICBs report their expenditure against the dental ringfence to NHS England as part of in-year financial reporting. Data for the 2023/24 financial year will be available after the end of the current financial year. NHS England’s finance business rules set out the approach to managing prior year under and overspends. The latest business rules are available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/icb-and-system-finance-business-rules/