We all know that NHS dental appointments can be almost impossible to access in many areas of the country.

Liberal Democrats have been highlighting this for months and calling on the Government to do more to ensure people can access this key service.

Yesterday, Tim Farron spoke in an opposition day debate on dental services and said that he had been told that some children were missing school to go abroad for dental appointments because they couldn’t get them locally:

I have heard at first hand from my constituents about the shocking scale of the difficulty of getting access to appointments for children. One attendance officer at one of our primary schools wrote to me earlier last year after she found that families in her school were going abroad for dental appointments. She said:

“Tim, I felt compelled to email you to tell you… We have a high number of children who are regularly missing out on education due to being unable to register with a local NHS dentist. A large number of our children have Polish, Romanian, Latvian and Ukrainian parents and therefore will find it easier to travel back to their parents’ original home country rather than wait for a local NHS dentist who is accepting patients.”

Wow! Let us be clear: she is saying that some children in Cumbria find it easier to get dental treatment travelling to a war zone than to access the NHS dental care that their parents have already paid for through their taxes.

He also highlighted that tooth decay was the number 1 reason for paediatric hospital admissions on his path. That is so shocking. The implications of poor dental health in childhood can last for a lifetime. Tooth decay is preventable and manageable. Free access to a dentist should be a right for children.

Tim said:

In 2022, the BDA found that one in four five-year-olds in my community in Cumbria had tooth decay, and that tooth decay was the No. 1 reason for hospital admissions among young people. Regular dental appointments are vital for preventing tooth decay, and even more so for children, whose teeth tend to decay more quickly. However, fewer and fewer children are able to access those Toggle showing location ofColumn 195appointments because of the negligence of this Government. In Cumbria, the proportion of children seen by a dentist in the NHS each year went from 64% in 2018 to just 50% last year, a drop of 14% in five years. Half of our children in our communities—from Grasmere to Grange, Appleby to Ambleside, Kendal to Kirkby Stephen and Windermere to Warcop—do not have access to an NHS dentist. That is a disgrace.

The situation was worse for adults, with a structural problem in that the NHS Trust only receive half the money it needs to provide services for everyone who needs them.

Regular dental checks are so important as they can pick up conditions like oral cancers and prevent tooth and gum issues potentially leading to heart problems.

Liberal Democrats have a plan to widen access to NHS dentistry, doing the following:

Reforming and increasing funding for the NHS dental services contract, to ensure it:

Encourages and incentivises dentists to take on NHS patients,
Meets patient need and demand rather than arbitrary targets,
Puts an end to ‘dental deserts’.
Increasing the number of dentist training places in the UK and continued recognition of EU trained dentists’ qualifications.
Writing into law proper workforce planning for health and social care, including projections for dentists and dental staff.
Launching an emergency scheme to ensure children, pregnant women and young mothers have access to their free check ups on time.
Supervised tooth brushing training for children in early years settings, such as nurseries.
Removing VAT on children’s toothbrushes and children’s toothpaste.

This Government has accelerated the constant running down of dental services that has been going on for the past two decades. It is disgraceful that such a vital element of health care is simply not there unless you can afford it.