Gregory Stafford

My right hon. Friend is precisely right. The BDA is absolutely right to call for those two things; they are what the Government should be working towards. As my right hon. Friend said, the contract started in 2006 under the last Labour Government and was based on units of dental activity, and it is fundamentally misaligned with clinical reality. For example, it pays the same whether a dentist does one filling or six. Essentially, it rewards volume, not complexity, and it actively discourages preventive care. We also had covid. We have to remember that around 4 million adults struggled to access dental care before covid, and that figure has now risen to nearly 14 million. Of course, covid alone did not create the crisis, but it did significantly accelerate and expose it, and we are still dealing with the aftermath. This Government came into office promising action, yet nearly two years on, the gap between promise and reality is difficult to ignore. The roll-out of additional appointments was delayed, and even where appointments have been delivered, the British Dental Association has noted that they amount to only around two extra urgent slots per dentist per month. That is not transformation; it is marginal adjustment. At the same time, the long-promised NHS workforce plan remains unpublished. The ambition to expand access depends entirely on having enough clinicians willing and able to deliver NHS care. Without a credible workforce strategy, the objectives of reform remain difficult to assess, let alone achieve. As has been mentioned, that pressure is not evenly distributed. In parts of rural England, there are as few as 10 NHS dental practices per 100,000 people. These so-called dental deserts are not random but the predictable outcome of a system that fails to align funding with need.