Gideon Amos

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Vickers. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Honiton and Sidmouth (Richard Foord) on leading a genuinely important debate. I also congratulate my hon. Friends the Members for Glastonbury and Somerton (Sarah Dyke), for Frome and East Somerset (Anna Sabine), for Bath (Wera Hobhouse), for Tiverton and Minehead (Rachel Gilmour), for South Devon (Caroline Voaden), for Chippenham (Sarah Gibson), for Wokingham (Clive Jones) and for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Vikki Slade)—to mention but a few. I also thank Government Members for their contributions to this important debate. Nearly three years ago, in 2022, long before I was a Member of Parliament, I launched a survey of dental provision for the NHS in my Taunton and Wellington constituency. It showed that fewer than half of people there had access to an NHS dentist. Nearly three years on things have, incredibly, got worse. There are 64,000 children in the county who did not see a dentist last year. That puts Somerset in the worst-hit 5% of local authorities in the country. As has been mentioned, access to NHS dentists in Somerset has fallen from more than half of people back in 2015 to less than a third—32%—this year. Over half the constituents who contacted me did have an NHS dentist but were then told it was going private, so they lost it. That decline has been consistent. My constituents are having to travel out of county and, as I said in the Chamber a couple of weeks ago, one of my constituents, a stage 3 cancer sufferer, is having to use her savings to pay for dental treatment that she is entitled to for free on the national health service. Taunton and Wellington has many of the same problems as other areas of the country, in particular the terrible state of the dental contract, which is at the root of much of this issue. I have met the BDA chair, as have Government Members, and it definitely wants a timescale for the negotiation of the new dental contract. I hope the Minister will give a clear timetable for the negotiations so that we can have a new contract, which is what is needed to unblock this situation. If we are to train and equip the profession for the future, which we need to do, we have to end the uncertainty that is exacerbating the drain from the profession and the retention crisis we have seen over the past few years. It is vital that that uncertainty comes to an end. Uncertainty hits in other ways as well. For example, we all want more housing built—certainly, those on the Liberal Democrat Benches do, and I know that Government Members do too—and we want new housing developments to be infrastructure-led, with GP surgeries and dental surgeries. Developers could contribute to those surgeries, but what would be the point in building them if they are to lie empty, unstaffed by the dentists we need? Will the Minister consider whether ICBs can be required to support the finding of dentists to staff those facilities, when they are provided? I put on the record the fact there was a huge £11 million underspend in Somerset last year. Children, pregnant women and cancer sufferers are all being denied free treatment and £11 million is sitting in the coffers—it is a scandal. I hope the Minister will consider ensuring that that money is ringfenced year on year, so that it is ultimately spent on the patients who need treatment. I urge the Minister both to give a timetable for the negotiation of the new contract and to safeguard the underspends so that the money can be used to help patients in Taunton and Wellington, in Somerset and in the south-west as a whole.