Vikki Slade

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. It is interesting that the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Jayne Kirkham) mentions dental vans: we were due to have one in Dorset, but I heard from my local NHS dentist in Corfe Mullen that they were seriously concerned about the prospect. They were worried that if they took it out to their rural community, there would be mayhem and frustration on the part of people who had not seen a dentist in so long. They were actually in fear for their staff, so they decided not to take the dental van. They also noted that it was 2.4 times more expensive than operating a practice, so they decided that they would invest the practice’s extra money in an additional graduate dentist. I met her a few weeks ago: her name is also Vicky. I am really excited about the work she could do, particularly in children’s health, but the decision to increase national insurance without exempting dentists means that the equivalent of half her salary will now go on additional national insurance for the staff within the practice. That is jeopardising the opportunity for practices like Corfe Mullen dental surgery to take on such staff. It is interesting that dental care was available on the NHS from its inception. The original advert for the NHS stated that it would provide “all medical, dental and nursing care” for everyone— “rich or poor, man, woman or child”. I am sure Beveridge and Bevan would turn in their graves if they thought that adults were pulling out their own teeth and children were being hospitalised for tooth extraction. It has already been said that fewer than a third of adults in the south-west are receiving dental care. When we describe it as a desert, we are not talking about our wonderful beaches. It is genuinely a dental desert. I find it hard because NHS Dorset has told us that it had a £9 million underspend in the last year, yet people are spending hours on the phone, begging for help. I am pleased that our ICB has approved an increase in the price of the unit of dental activity, but why is that being delayed until next year, and why are we not going further? Why is it that our hospital can find the money to go to a private hospital and sort out all the knee replacements, but our dentists cannot be brought online to deal with urgent cases? I ask the Minister to instruct ICBs across the south-west and beyond to ringfence the underspend in dental budgets, so that it cannot be used to plug the gap elsewhere in the service while people are struggling. Katie in Bearwood told me that she will lose her front tooth if she does not get help soon. She wakes up every day with blood on her pillow and all over her teeth. The pain is so unbearable that it has her in tears, and she has lost two stone in weight as she can barely eat. She cannot get a referral to hospital without paying to see a private dentist. She is ashamed to go out in public. She said that she will have to pay £1,000 in private costs before she can be seen, but nobody will give her a loan. Zoe in Wimborne told me it has been nine years since she has seen a dentist, and that she is close to using the old-fashioned method of string and a door. It is absolutely ridiculous. It cannot be allowed to carry on. I cannot not talk about the children in our area. It is wonderful that the Government are bringing in supervised toothbrushing, but what is the point if children then cannot see a dentist? I was mortified in 2022 when I took a foster child who had come to live with me to my dentist, because I had assumed that, as with GP practices, looked-after children would automatically be added to a family’s NHS practice. How wrong I was. We did not realise, so we insisted on telling the dentist that they had to see this child. He was 11 years old and he had seven teeth gone already. He needed those teeth replacing for his future and for his smile. If we cannot do it for the adults, we must at the very least do it for our children, especially our looked-after children.