Yvette Cooper MP: Tories cause decay of NHS dentistry

Yvette Cooper MP writes: For thousands of people in our area, getting a check-up or urgent dental treatment on the NHS has become a complete nightmare. NHS dentists are closing, leaving patients in pain or facing massive bills. This is a total disgrace. The Conservative government has run NHS dentistry into the ground – our towns deserve better.

Year after year, it has got harder to get NHS dental care round here. People are being turned away from our local dentists. Many people haven’t been able to get check-ups since before Covid. One mum told me that her teenage daughter was in such terrible tooth pain she was unable to go to school, but when she tried to get an emergency appointment, the local dentist she had been to for years refused to see her for over a week unless she paid privately. Other people have told me how they’ve been waiting over a year for NHS treatment because they can’t afford the high private cost. Worst of all, I heard from a Pontefract man who tried to pull his tooth out with pliers because he was in so much pain and couldn’t get an NHS dentist appointment.

The news that Bupa’s NHS Dental Practice in Pontefract is closing in June is a further hammer blow putting even more pressure on our dental services. I met with them to urge them to rethink and to see if anything more could done to protect local dental services. Their response was that they simply could not recruit any NHS dentists to provide the service and that the government dentistry policy just wasn’t working.

Ministers have been warned about this growing crisis for years. After 13 years of Conservative mismanagement of the health service, dentists are quitting in droves leaving millions of people across the country, including thousands in our area, without an NHS dentist. Yet astonishingly I’ve been told that the Department of Health’s dentistry budget is £400million underspent. That just shows the total mess the government’s dentistry policy is in.

If children especially can’t get routine check-ups then dental problems aren’t spotted, decay gets work and it costs everyone far more later on.

This dentistry crisis is widening inequality. Tory Ministers and their friends may all be able to afford private dental treatment without batting an eyelid. But they don’t have a clue how families across Yorkshire are struggling with the cost of living and can’t possibly afford these private bills. Getting urgent treatment for something like root canal can cost as much as a thousand pounds – how on earth are most people supposed to afford that?

Be it in dentistry, medicine, surgery, nursing, midwifery or support services, the Tories are a wrecking ball causing chaos in our NHS. They’ve done no workforce planning and they’ve stood back and shrugged their shoulders while our services get worse.

Ministers need to get a grip. Instead of sitting on their hands, they need to take rapid action to get NHS dentists back into the Five Towns and West Yorkshire so families can get the dental appointments they desperately need. Patients deserve an NHS that works for everyone.