Somerset MPs urge reform of 'broken' NHS dental contracts
Cross-party call for immediate action as county faces 'dental desert' crisis
Somerset MPs have united to demand reforms to the NHS dental contract to address a “Dickensian” crisis in healthcare.
Somerset has been classed as a ‘dental desert’, with large numbers of residents being unable to access NHS dentistry since the coronavirus pandemic, leaving people reliant on private dentists or DIY methods.
Since being elected, the Labour government has sought to provide more funding for NHS dentists, resulting in three new practices opening in Somerset and more emergency appointments being offered.
But both Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs have urged the government to go further and faster, putting in place a new contract which will retain NHS dentists and ensure the public can locally access such services.
Yeovil MP Adam Dance opened a debate on NHS dentistry in the House of Commons on Monday evening (June 15), likening the current situation to “a Charles Dickens novel”.
He said: “Some 56 per cent of children in Somerset did not see an NHS dentist in 2025.
“I have heard from 15 parents directly who have recently taken their children to hospital with dental issues.
“One local told me that her 86-year-old father was in so much pain that he pulled out his own teeth because he could not get dental treatment.
“The situation has got so bad that some locals are telling me that it is cheaper, sometimes by hundreds of pounds, to fly to Spain to get dental treatment – and a tan, of course.”
Since being elected in July 2024, Mr Dance has secured additional NHS dental appointments in his constituency, with the NHS Somerset integrated care board (ICB) recently commissioning new surgeries in Chard and Crewkerne.
He said he was grateful for the extra appointments in his area, but said that wider issues surrounding NHS funding and retaining dentists for NHS work were persisting.
He said: “There is not enough money to open new NHS dentist practices. We need NHS dentists in Yeovil, Ilminster and the rest of my constituency.
“While the number of dentists registering to provide care in the UK has gone up to around 47,000, we are seeing the number of NHS dentists fall. Only around 25,000 dentists are doing some work for the NHS.”
Mr Dance said that the existing NHS dental contract (which has been in place since 2006) “just does not work”, urging the government to speed up its planned reforms.
He said: “The system basically sets quotas on the number of patients a dentist can see on the NHS. If they go over that quota, dentists are not paid and will have to cover the cost of material, lab work and other overheads.
“One of the frustrating things that I found when we were setting up a new NHS dentist in my area is that dentists cannot prioritise locals.
“The dental contract means that people do not register with a dentist as they do a GP; they can attend any dental practice that is taking NHS patients, even if the practice is based miles away.
“When we got the new practices open, there was no guarantee that locals who needed a dentist most would get one. That is madness.”
Sir Ashley Fox, the Conservative MP for Bridgwater, admitted that his party did not do enough to address issues with NHS dentistry during its 14 years in power – and urged the government to move faster with its own reforms.
He said: “For meaningful change to be felt by my constituents and patients across the country, reform of the system needs to start being treated as a priority.
“Access to quality NHS dental care should be available to all, not just those in urban Labour constituencies.
“Previous governments, including previous Conservative governments, did not do enough to fix the problem. The last government did take steps, including an uprating of NHS dental unit pricing, but far more needs to be done to address the deeper structural issues in the system.
“Reform of the contract is fundamentally what we need, and one would hope that after two years in his place, the minister would have developed an idea of what to take forward.”
Gideon Amos MP (Lib Dem, Taunton and Wellington) welcomed the additional appointments which had been offered in Wellington since October 2025, but said these achievements came “against a background of limited resources and a broken funding system”.
He elaborated: “Hard-pressed parents responded to my survey to record that they are paying £100 a year per child because they cannot access NHS dentists.
“That grosses up to £4m spent by parents in my constituency in the last five years. In a cost of living crisis, that is clearly unacceptable.
“Increasingly, I and they believe that we should be prioritising children for NHS appointments, and I urge the government to consider that in its reforms.”
Tessa Munt MP (Lib Dem, Wells and Mendip Hills) added: “I welcome the fact that the government has decided to tie in newly qualified dentists so that they work in the NHS for three years – but since that only starts next year, and the crisis is now, we should be starting that measure in September 2026, not waiting until September 2027.”
Care minister Stephen Kinnock MP described Somerset as “an outlier” with “significant problems”, and promised that urgent action would be taken to change NHS dental contracts on top of additional funding.
He said: “When we came into office, we inherited an appalling situation, not just in dentistry but right across my primary, community and social care portfolio.
“The previous government utterly failed to reform the contract, to set up any new training schools or to expand any training places.
“I am afraid that the end result is this Dickensian state of affairs, where people have been resorting to DIY dentistry and tooth decay is the number one cause of hospital admission for children aged five to nine.
“There are significant problems in Somerset due to access to dentistry, for all the reasons we have talked about in this debate, which are particularly acute in Somerset. I have had calls with a senior official from the ICB there to try to figure out what is going on.
“We are committed to reforming the dental contract within this parliament, with a focus on matching resources to need, improving access, promoting prevention, rewarding dentists fairly and ensuring that we use the skills of the whole dentistry family.
“We are not rushing these changes, because the dental system is complex and we have to get this right.”
The NHS Somerset ICB stated after the debate that the county’s 52 NHS dental practices had carried out roughly three per cent more NHS work in 2025/26 than in the previous financial year.
Director of primary care Sukeina Kassam said: “Improving access to NHS dentistry is one of our top priorities, as we know it is hugely important to local people.
“It is great to see our improvement programme is leading to better access and more NHS dental care being provided in Somerset.”
The ICB has been implementing numerous measures to increase NHS dental work being carried out in Somerset – including playing local dentists more for NHS work, making more urgent appointments available through the NHS 111 service, and using ‘golden hellos’ to recruit new dental staff.
Place director David McClay added: “We know there is more to do and, following the first wave of new NHS practices, we are now identifying our next areas of focus.
“Measures could include encouraging existing practices to deliver more NHS activity or developing proposals for more new NHS practices.”