Richard Foord

I am appalled to hear about those examples from my hon. Friend. The really disappointing thing is that some of the expense of secondary care could be avoided with a little more investment upstream in primary care. There is a clear disparity between the work that dentists do in the NHS and in private practice. There is so much more emphasis in private practice on preventive care. We need to see that same level of preventive work happening in the NHS. At an Adjournment debate last week in the main Chamber, it struck me that although many of us were there seeking to draw attention to NHS dentistry, not a single Conservative MP attended. I thank the Minister in the new Government for showing more commitment to NHS dentistry than the last administration, yet we have further to go. The Government prioritised the NHS in the Budget, allocating it an additional £25.7 billion. However, we needed more reference to dentistry in the Budget. The Labour party’s manifesto talked about a dental rescue plan that would provide 700,000 more appointments and, most critically, focus on the retention of dentists in the NHS. We urgently need that. We urgently need a dental rescue package to bring dentists back to the NHS, particularly in the south-west, where we have a dental training school in Plymouth. We understand that dentists, once trained, often stay where they went to university, so we need more dentists to be attracted to the south-west and to stay once they are there.