MEASURES aimed at improving access to NHS dentistry have instead led to a decline in new patients and faltering recruitment, MPs are expected to warn today.

The Dental Recovery Plan, unveiled by the previous Tory government last February, has “comprehensively failed,” a damning report due to be released today by the public accounts committee (PAC) is to warn.

MPs found that the New Patient Premium saw the number of new NHS patients fall by 3 per cent.

The initiative, which provided practices with credits for each eligible new patient, cost at least £88 million. 

The “golden hello” scheme, which gave incentive payments to attract dentists to under-served areas, only managed to appoint 20 per cent of the 240 dentists expected.

Increasing the minimum pay rate for each unit of work from £23 to £28 also failed to deliver any improvements, the committee noted.

The idea of introducing mobile dental vans was also abandoned. 

Committee chairman Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown said: “It is utterly disgraceful that, in the 21st century, some Britons have been forced to remove their own teeth. 

“Almost unbelievably, the government’s initiatives appear to have actually resulted in worsening the picture, with fewer new patients seen since the plan’s introduction.”

Current funding and contractual arrangements would only cover about half of England’s population to see an NHS dentist over a two-year period “at best,” the report said.

Only 40 per cent of adults had seen an NHS dentist in the two years to March 2024, compared with 49 per cent in the two years pre-pandemic, it found.

Mark Jones, founder of Toothless in England said: “The PAC’s report has revealed a gaping hole between what the government says it will do to alleviate some of the difficulties patients face when attempting to access NHS dentistry and what is actually done by those in charge of fulfilling that promise.

“The questions we’re asking is how much longer must dental patients wait before their oral health needs are met — and can we ever trust the answer?”

Shiv Pabary from the British Dental Association said: “MPs have arrived at an inescapable conclusion, that tweaks at the margins have not and will not save NHS dentistry.

“We’ve never budged from our view that governments past and present have needed to go further and faster.”

The Department of Health and Social Care said that Labour “inherited a broken NHS dental sector” and was fixing it through its Plan for Change, and has delivered on its manifesto pledge by rolling out 700,000 extra urgent appointments.