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A government scheme to boost the provision of dental care across England has “comprehensively failed” and actually resulted in fewer new patients seeing an NHS dentist, according to an influential cross-party group of MPs.
A damning report by the House of Commons public accounts committee (PAC) on Friday warned that the last Conservative government’s “dental recovery plan” has exacerbated the crisis facing the sector.
In February last year, ministers vowed to create an additional 2.5mn appointments and allocated £200mn towards their plan for dentistry.
Dentists working in parts of the country with fewer services were told they would be able to claim one-off “golden hello” payments of £20,000 for working in “underserved areas for up to three years”.
However, MPs found that the number of new patients being seen dropped by 3 per cent, despite an £88mn scheme that incentivised practices to take on new NHS cases.
Fewer than 20 per cent of the 240 dentists expected to be recruited under the “golden hello” scheme had so far been appointed, MPs said, while the pledge to roll out mobile dental vans to rural and coastal areas where access is more difficult has been abandoned.
With the situation as it is, around half the population in England would be able to access an NHS dentist over the next two years, MPs said.
“This country is now years deep in an avalanche of harrowing stories of the impact of dentistry’s system failure,” said Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, chair of the PAC.
“Last year’s Dental Recovery Plan was supposed to address these problems, something our report has found it has signally failed to do.
“Almost unbelievably, the government’s initiatives appear to have actually resulted in worsening the picture, with fewer new patients seen since the plan’s introduction.”
The new Labour government has pledged to fix what the committee described as a dental contract that “remains unfit for purpose” and is pushing dentists away from the NHS and towards private practice.
Under NHS contract terms, dentists are paid a set income to deliver a certain number of treatments — called “units of dental activity” or UDAs — a year. The amount of procedures dentists can receive payment for annually is capped.
Dentists have said the system had left them struggling to cover their costs, with simpler dental work sometimes remunerated at the same rate as complicated treatments.
MPs on the committee said a new contract should be negotiated with dentists as a priority and the current government should set out a timetable to deliver its pledge for reform.
The Department of Health and Social Care said: “This government inherited a broken NHS dental sector after years of neglect.
“We’re getting on with fixing it through our Plan for Change, so the NHS can be there for patients once again.”
