NHS Dental Reforms: Universal Urgent Care but Funding Unchanged?
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- Published: Tuesday, 15 July 2025 09:43
- Written by Peter Ingle
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GDPUK readers will be familiar with the St Pauls Dental Practice in Bristol which after being closed by BUPA became a focus for community activism, and reopened to lengthy queues in 2024.
Those queues prompted the then-Shadow Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, to visit the practice where he pledged that Labour would invite dentists to the Department of Health and Social Care the Monday after he took office, if Labour won the election.
At the time, Mr Streeting said: "We’ve got to fix the fundamentals. We’ve got to go to the root causes of the NHS dentistry crisis...until people get that reform, they’re not going to get NHS dentistry as we once knew it."
But over a year later, speaking to LBC, dentists at the practice said that despite Mr Streeting’s promises, Labour had not addressed the underlying problems behind the staffing crisis affecting NHS dentistry. "Nothing has changed. I just keep thinking, was it because it was election time?" says the practice’s owner Shivani Bhandari. "Waiting queues have gone worse."
In the 10-year Health Plan, the government promised to reform the NHS dental contract and declared that it would make all newly qualified dentists work for 3 years in the NHS.
None of that has an immediate effect on the almost 3,000 unfilled NHS dental workforce vacancies.
The Mirror took a somewhat more positive view of developments. With the headline “Major NHS change will see EVERYONE get a dentist within four years” the paper described a ‘big win’ for its Dentists for All campaign. While it claimed the commitment to reform the contract by the end of this Parliament as a major victory for its campaign, the paper did go on to reveal the rigid funding constraints that any new contract will have.
The paper extensively quoted Stephen Kinnock, Minister for Care, including his description of the current state of NHS dentistry, saying, “We’re on a burning platform." In terms of timing, following Wes Streeting’s previous refusal to set a date, he had said: “We are absolutely clear that we have to fix this before the end of this Parliament. We want transformed NHS dentistry by 2035. But it is absolutely clear that the fundamental contract reform to put us on the pathway to change has to happen within this parliament.”
However his ambitions did not run to restoring a comprehensive service: “What does success look like by the end of this Parliament? Everyone who needs access to urgent and unscheduled care must be able to access it and dentists must be incentivised and motivated to deliver NHS dentistry.”
However Mr Kinnock spelt out that the Treasury will not fund a full service as previous generations knew it. Any new contract will stick with the familiar formula of recycling current "underspends" arising from clawback, and diverting activity to those deemed to be priorities.
Mr Kinnock said: “I think we’ve got to define what we want to do with the NHS contract, based on the reality of the finite resource that we will have. We have to work on the assumption that we will have the financial envelope in the region of the current financial settlement. That is the reality of the world that we live in.”
Image: BBC
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