Eddie Crouch Describes Rachel Reeves’ Letter as Perverse
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- Published: Thursday, 20 November 2025 10:51
- Written by Peter Ingle
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One week before one of the most feverishly anticipated budgets in decades, the Chancellor of the Exchequer has weighed in on private dental fees. If nothing else this either demonstrates that at last the budget is looking good, all the internal tensions about it have been settled, and there is no more work to do on it, or that its preparation has been removed from her hands.
Readers of GDPUK have already expressed their generally withering opinion of both the logic behind this, and the poorly written Times article which reported Rachel Reeves’ intention to ask the Competition and Marketing Authority(CMA) to investigate private dental fees.
The BDA wasted no time in expressing their bemusement at this latest assault from a government that many once had high hopes for, describing the move as “Utterly perverse.”
Going onto the attack, the BDA said that the Chancellor’s decision to call on the CMA to launch an investigation into the pricing of private dentistry was: “merely a fig leaf for her failure to properly fund NHS care.”
The BDA quoted from the letter Rachel Reeves sent to the CMA where she had said: "The scourge of hidden costs, lack of transparency and overtreatment has blighted families in need of dental treatment for too long. That’s why I want to see urgent action taken to help reduce prices, whilst the cost of living still puts pressure on families across the country.” As a well-known regulator might say, she appeared to lack insight, and the BDA proceeded to spell out just how nonsensical her request was.
As they pointed out, when it came to the cost of living, private practices have had to cover significant increases in overheads following the same Chancellor’s first budget, with surging costs for materials, utilities, and of course NI. Over the last 4 years the BDA estimated the increase in private fees at an average of 13.8%. Meanwhile the costs of delivering care had increased by as much in a single year. The cumulative inflation figure for the period 2021 to date stands at 24.5%.
Private dentistry they reminded her, was not a unique service and it too needed to operate to market forces, with prices that cover the costs of delivering treatment.
A Chancellor genuinely concerned about the cost of living for hard working families and those struggling to make ends meet, might have improved the funding of NHS dentistry. However this Chancellor had, “not provided a penny of new investment to support the rebuild of NHS dentistry.”
The BDA recently told the Public Accounts Committee that loss-making NHS services were being kept afloat by a cross subsidy from private work of over £330m. So with the majority of practices providing a mixture of NHS and private care, choking off private work would leave less cash to prop up their NHS offering.
BDA Chair Eddie Crouch said: “This call for an investigation is utterly perverse. The Chancellor is singling out private dentists for doing what any business does: covering their costs, some of which are of the Chancellor’s own making. At the same time, she’s very happy to starve NHS services of vital funding. We’d remind her that profits from private care are all that are keeping NHS dentistry afloat.”
The Chancellor’s grip of basic economics has been questioned before. With time to reflect it might yet dawn on her that one way for hard pressed mixed practices to reduce their costs, would be to cut back on loss making NHS activities.
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