OPINION: Ipswich MP Jack Abbott on fixing dental service

New Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, recently declared that, after 14 years of the Conservatives in power, 'the NHS is broken’.

You only needed to hear some of the contributions made by colleagues in that debate to realise just how deep and widespread the problems are.

My colleague’s testimonies reflect what I have heard on doorsteps across Ipswich over the years; personal, often heartbreaking stories of how people have been left in fear and pain, unable to receive the care they so desperately need.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting with Ipswich MP Jack Abbott. (Image: Labour Party)

From inaccessible GP appointments to our failing mental health trust and from record waiting lists to falling numbers of health visitors, wherever you turn, people are suffering the consequences of years of Conservative negligence.

Although I was not called to take part in the debate, I had prepared to speak about the crisis in NHS dentistry.

Statistics released by the NHS show that the East of England has the second-lowest number of children and second-lowest number of adults seen by an NHS dentist in 2023-24.

Just over a third of adults locally have seen a dentist in the last year, and nearly half of children have not had an appointment - both are significantly lower numbers than the national averages.

In 2022-23, nearly 1,500 people in Suffolk were forced to attend A&E for tooth decay. And, in the same period, the most common reason for a child aged between 6 and 10 to attend hospital was tooth decay.

Is it any wonder, then, that the effects of our dental desert reverberate throughout our health service?

This shows not only one abject failure in isolation, but a chain of failure and of missed opportunities - children missing school, the near endless waiting times in A&E getting longer and longer, already scarce hospital beds taken up - all for what is an entirely preventable failure in the NHS dentistry system.

Clearly, the new government has inherited a fundamentally broken system. But systems do not break themselves.

This is a crisis that grew from the previous Conservative government’s failures, spread over 14 years and ignored by a conveyor belt of Prime Ministers. Six health secretaries in little over three years has hardly helped either.

And so, the task falls to Labour - the party which founded the NHS - to pick up the pieces of our health service, just as we have had to do before.

The new dentistry school run by the University of Suffolk is a real boost and will support oral health locally, but our new Labour government will need to bolster this provision.

Indeed, I have been encouraged by the new Health Secretary’s clear intention to turn this crisis around.

The government’s Dentistry Rescue Plan is ambitious, holistic, and sorely needed. Delivering 700,000 more NHS dental appointments. Recruiting more dentists in the areas which need them most, including in Suffolk.

Reforming the Dental Contract to focus on long-term prevention and staff retention. Supervised tooth brushing for early years children, because the earlier you can build healthy habits, the longer they last.

All paid for by the abolition of the non-dom tax status and cracking down on tax avoidance.

The new government will not be judged by its promises, however. It will be judged by its actions.

So now is the time to deliver in Ipswich, in Suffolk, in the East of England, and across the entire country.

There is hardly a more pressing issue for a government of national service than rescuing our country’s most beloved public service.