Throughout my conversations with voters during last year’s election campaign, I heard loud and clear the deep-lying frustration and disappointment felt by residents across Portsmouth about the poor state of our public services.
Patients and NHS staff alike were let down by 14 years of underinvestment and failure to reform by the previous Conservative Government, which hollowed out local services. Nowhere was this more apparent than in NHS dentistry where it has become impossible for some patients to get any kind of appointment at all.
Indeed, in South East, 26% of patients who tried to see an NHS dentist in the last two years were unable to do so, with access to NHS dentistry increasingly a lottery across the country.
We have all seen the appalling footage of patients queuing round the block in some parts of England. Nationally, after more than a decade of failure, the Tories shockingly left millions waiting for treatment. They brought in a New Patient Premium scheme that didn’t have any impact for new patients, with new figures revealing that £88 million was wasted on the scheme.
Labour promised we would end the misery faced by hundreds of thousands of people unable to get urgent dental care. Today we’re starting to deliver on that commitment. Minister for Care Stephen Kinnock MP has announced that hundreds of thousands of people, including in Portsmouth will soon be able to access urgent and emergency dental care as the government and NHS rolls out 700,000 extra urgent appointments, delivering on Labour’s manifesto commitment. This is a critical step forward as the Labour Government begins to fix the broken system left behind by the previous Conservative administration.
Patients across the country will benefit – in Hampshire and Isle of Wight, 30,032 urgent care appointments alone are to be delivered.
Residents in Portsmouth deserve far more than the deterioration of services that they have witnessed over the past decade. I campaigned hard on this issue before the general election, and I will continue to do so as your local MP. We all know that NHS dentistry cannot be rebuilt overnight, but I am delighted that this Labour Government is taking such an important step towards not only repairing NHS dentistry but making it fit for the future.
We have already seen the change Labour is making, with Health Secretary Wes Streeting announcing earlier this month that we have stuck to our word and delivered that first step we promised of two million more appointments a year to cut NHS waiting lists – and we’ve done it
seven months early. Now Labour’s new, additional urgent dentist appointments will help many residents in Portsmouth.
Through our Plan for Change, this government will rebuild dentistry including a focus on prevention and the retention of NHS dentists. This will take time, but today marks an important step forward towards getting NHS dentistry back on its feet.
