A scathing report by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has revealed that the government’s attempts to improve access to NHS dentistry have proved unsuccessful. Without serious reform, warns the PAC, there is little hope for the future of NHS dentistry and the patients that continue to suffer due to lack of access to effective care.

The report finds that, at best, only around half of the English population have been able to see an NHS dentist over a two-year period under current funding and contractual arrangements. Only 40 per cent of adults saw an NHS dentist in the two years to March 2024, compared to 49 per cent in the two years before the Covid-19 pandemic.

The PAC describes the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) and NHS England’s (NHSE) February 2024 dental recovery plan as a comprehensive failure, as it was not ambitious enough to meet its four initiatives. These are:

The New Patient Premium (NPP) was an incentive that would see practices receive credits for every new patient they saw, but actually resulted in three per cent fewer new patients seeing a dentist since the introduction of the scheme in March 2024. The NPP cost at least £88 million.

The ‘golden hello’ recruitment scheme gave incentive payments of £20,000 for 240 dentists, though less than 20 per cent of the expected 240 has been appointed by February 2025.

Mobile dental vans were supposed to deliver treatment in targeted communities cities, though this was scrapped.

Furthermore, an uplift to the minimum value of contractually agreed dental activity to £28 failed to deliver any noticeable improvements.

Thus, the PAC report finds the current NHS dental contract not fit for purpose, labelling a fundamental issue as the difference between NHS and private pay for a dentist. There were 34,520 dentists registered to provide dentistry in England in April 2023, but only 24,193 of these provided some NHS dental care in 2023-24. In March 2024, there were more than 5,500 vacancies across NHS dentistry, with many of these going unfilled for over 180 days.

The PAC recommended that NHSE would be better off drawing up a new contract rather than changing the current one as it fails to address the real problem, to which NHSE agreed.

The PAC is thus calling on NHSE and DHSC to be transparent about the actual cost of delivering NHS dentistry, as any efforts at reform will fall short of the fundamental issues around the affordability of NHS work.

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, chair of the Committee, said: “This country is now years deep in an avalanche of harrowing stories of the impact of dentistry’s system failure. It is utterly disgraceful that, in the 21st century, some Britons have been forced to remove their own teeth. Last year’s Dental Recovery Plan was supposed to address these problems, something our report has found it has signally failed to do. Almost unbelievably, the government’s initiatives appear to have actually resulted in worsening the picture, with fewer new patients seen since the Plan’s introduction.”

On scrapping the current NHSE dentistry contract, he integrated: “This gives the government the opportunity to completely reconfigure the way the NHS is run. In particular, so that more resources can be devoted to the local health boards who commission dentistry services. At the same time, a new contract should be negotiated with dentists so that all in this country will have proper access to a new NHS dentist for the treatment they need. Parliament, the dental profession and patients all. Now need to know, as a matter of urgency, what comes next.”