Stephen Kinnock

I congratulate the hon. Members for Yeovil (Adam Dance), for Waveney Valley (Adrian Ramsay) and for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) on securing this important debate. When we came into office, we inherited an appalling situation not just in dentistry but right across my primary, community and social care portfolio. The last Government tinkered at the edges—for example, taxpayers footed the bill for their new patient premium to the tune of £126 million, but it had no impact on patients, so we cancelled it as a total waste of time and money. What is more, the previous Government utterly failed to reform the contract, to set up any new training schools or to expand any training places. I am afraid that the end result is this Dickensian state of affairs, where people have been resorting to DIY dentistry and tooth decay is the No. 1 cause of hospital admission for children aged five to nine. Once again, it therefore falls to a Labour Government to fix the problem, and our job is twofold: to get NHS dentistry back on its feet and to make it fit for the future. We will continue the shift to prevention by backing supervised tooth brushing, water fluoridation, and healthy food and drink for children. We will be consulting on long-term reforms to the dental contract. We have been cracking on with our plan for change to end the misery faced by hundreds of thousands of people unable to get urgent care. To start with, we are on track to have delivered more than 2.5 million additional dental treatments compared with the same period before the general election. Those have been delivered thanks to our work on cutting the underspend; in July 2024, we inherited shocking annual underspends in dentistry—money that the previous Government could not even get out of the door due to their sheer incompetence.