Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, with reference to the Local Government Association report, Tackling poor oral health in children: local government's public health role, published in April 2016, what estimate he has made of the cost to the NHS of the rise in the number of hospital tooth extractions by dentistry services in each year since 2012-13.

The cost of tooth extractions carried out in hospitals is assessed from reference costs.

The following table shows the estimated cost of tooth extractions for all patients in hospitals from 2012/13 to 2015/16 and for all adults from 2010/11 to 2015/16. The data covers all tooth extractions/removals.

Reference costs are the average unit costs to National Health Service trusts and NHS foundation trusts of providing defined services in a given financial year to NHS patients. Reference costs for acute care are collected by healthcare resource group, which are standard groupings of clinically similar treatments which use common levels of healthcare resource.

Reference Costs: Tooth extractions/removals 2010/11 to 2015/16

Source: Department of Health, Reference Costs