Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking on (a) funding and (b) staffing to reduce the NHS dentistry backlog resulting from the covid-19 pandemic.

During the pandemic, we provided more than £1.7 billion in income protection to maintain National Health Service dental capacity and services. An additional £50 million was made available in the last quarter of 2021/22 to ensure that more patients in England could obtain an NHS dental appointment.

In September, we announced ‘Our plan for patients’, which outlines how we will meet oral health needs and increase access to dental care. The plan includes improvements to ensure dentists are renumerated fairly for more complex work, allowing greater flexibility to reallocate resources and to utilise dentists with greater capacity to deliver NHS treatment, whilst enabling full use of the dental team. The plan also includes streamlining processes for overseas dentists and holding the local NHS to account for dentistry provision. In addition, Health Education England is also reforming dental education to improve the recruitment and retention of dental professionals.