Vikki Slade

It is great to follow the hon. Member for Leeds South West and Morley (Mark Sewards) as I recall my husband losing his two front teeth to a crash helmet in his face, and my nephew Arlo currently has plastic on his teeth having lost his two front teeth at the age of 10 to his little brother. Jonathan, a senior NHS dentist in my constituency, whom I consider to be a true expert, as he has worked for almost 40 years in NHS dentistry, told me that, in 2024, we had a £9 million underspend in our dentistry budget—goodness knows where that has gone—and a freedom of information request has revealed that, this year, £6 million was removed from a supposedly ringfenced budget for dentistry. What is going on in Dorset? The ICBs have arranged for urgent care to be done through NHS 101, but no one knows about it. That means one provider that provided 4,000 appointments last year will deliver only 1,300 this year. Alongside my colleagues, I have been calling for a dental school in Dorset for years. It seems that we may be getting something in Bournemouth, but only for dental technicians, not for dentists, which is not much good to those of us who need complex care. In Poole, we have heard proposals for a centre for complex care for people with disabilities or neurodiversity, but we need £4 million of capital, and no one can tell us where capital for dentistry comes from. So it seems that in Dorset things are in a bit of a mess. We have heard that dentists were told they could have an additional 10% in the number of dental units, but they were not given the information until six weeks before the end of the year, meaning they have no opportunity to spend them. Residents who do have a dentist tell me that their dentists are refusing extractions or anything complicated, instead referring them to the hospital, where they are added to the secondary care waiting list. Why? Because the dentists cannot make enough money from them, and the tax trap apparently means they are reducing their number of hours on the NHS, because the tax treatment of the fees in the private sector means that they are better off doing it that way round. Frankly, it is a complete mess. I welcome the changes that mean dentists have to stay in the NHS for three years, but I do have to ask the question: why should our residents only have junior dentists dealing with their complex care? It is a disgrace that, over the five years to 2024, 100,000 children were admitted to hospital with rotting teeth. This issue is now urgent. We cannot waste any more time, and if it is not addressed, we will continue to lose NHS dentists as quickly as my constituents and our colleagues are losing their teeth.