The British Dental Association has warned Health Secretary Sajid Javid's ambition to level up on health will be impossible to deliver without real ambition to reform a broken NHS dental service.

Speaking at the Conservative Party Conference, Javid failed to make any mention of the precarious state of NHS dental services. Over 30 million NHS appointments have been lost in England since the start of the pandemic, however families experienced a postcode lottery of care even before coronavirus pandemic.

While lockdown restrictions have slashed capacity in the service, ongoing pressures have reduced access. The widely discredited NHS contract system funds care for little over half the population and has left many areas including the East of England experiencing acute recruitment and retention problems.

In his speech, the Health Secretary outlined his plans to make this ‘the era of reform’. While government has already committed to reform NHS dentistry, the BDA has said government ministers must be ambitious, with no return to a 'business as usual' model where access problems were the norm. It has stressed steps must also be taken to tackle oral health inequalities which are expected to widen, given ongoing access problems, the suspension and disruption to public health programmes and the impact of sugar-rich lockdown diets.

Eddie Crouch, chair of the BDA, said: "A levelling up agenda that fails to grasp the nettle on dentistry is just empty words. The crisis in this service predates COVID. It's the practices unable to fill vacancies, patients struggling to secure needed care, and desperate people taking matters into their own hands.

"Ministers have a responsibility to ensure the grotesque spectacle of 'DIY dentistry' ends. We need more than slogans to deliver for millions of patients unable to access care."