Brian Mathew

In my constituency of Melksham and Devizes in Wiltshire, in two years only 29% of adults were seen by dentists. Only 56% of Wiltshire’s children are seen by an NHS dentist each year, which is a figure of shame, given that the NHS recommends that children be seen regularly from their very first tooth. Nationally, the picture is just as bleak. According to NHS England, over 12 million children across the country did not see an NHS dentist at all in the year to June 2024. The consequences are severe. Tooth decay is now the leading cause of hospital admissions for children aged six to 10 in England, with over 35,000 children admitted each year for tooth extractions under general anaesthetic. Those risky procedures are almost entirely preventable. The lack of access to dental services across the country has a devastating knock-on impact on our country’s overall health, evidenced by rising levels of oral cancers in the UK. These include cancers of the tongue, lips, gums, tonsils and throat—the eighth-most common cancer in the UK, with nearly 12,000 new cases recorded in 2023. Eddie Crouch, chair of the British Dental Association, has pointed out that dentists are on the frontline of detecting those cancers before they turn fatal. With early detection, oral cancers have a survival rate of around 90%, but if diagnosis is delayed that drops to just 50%. The ongoing crisis in NHS dentistry is therefore not just a matter of convenience, but a matter of life and death for some patients. The previous Health Secretary was right when he said that cancer survival should not come down to who won the lottery of life. I urge the Government to heed his words and act with urgency to end the dental deserts, restore children’s services before a generation grows up without routine care, and rebuild the services that catch those cancers early and save lives. Lastly, on Ukrainian dentists who could be working for the NHS, will the Minister acknowledge their qualifications and allow them to practice here? The current situation is ridiculous, with a professor of dentistry in my area, for example, reduced to working as a dental assistant.