Meeting of the Parliament 08 February 2023
I am very pleased to rise for my party to speak in this debate. There is a dentistry crisis in Scotland. It can be felt everywhere—it is visited in each of our mailbags and is inflicting pain on people up and down the country every day—yet the Government’s amendment seeks to delete that reality from the parliamentary proceedings. That is astonishing. Again, it shows the cognitive dissonance that we have come to know well from the Government, which has its head in the sand and displays the dead hand of ministerial disinterest in things that matter to real people.
Indeed, it was a show of astonishing timing that the Government published a letter last night that evidenced its paltry effort in kicking issues down the road, with promises of jam tomorrow to our hard-working dentists.
Far too many Scots face huge obstacles in accessing NHS dental check-ups. The number of NHS treatments that are being conducted is dramatically below pre-pandemic levels. Liberal Democrat research has revealed soaring waits for dental treatment, with some patients waiting more than three years for help. Imagine having to deal with dental pain for three years—it is astonishing.
The situation is dire right across the country. Eleven health boards recorded patients having to wait more than a year for treatment. A freedom of information request to health boards showed that dentists submitted about 3.2 million claims for NHS work between January and November last year. That sounds like quite a lot, but if we compare that with the 5.6 million claims for NHS dental work in 2019, we start to understand the quantum of the problem and the fall-away in dental work.
Put simply, many people either are forced to wait months for NHS dental treatment or are unable to access NHS care at all. In rural communities, the situation is even more acute. In Orkney and Shetland, the number of NHS dental claims has fallen by more than 50 per cent, while many practices in Dumfries and Galloway have closed their doors to NHS work entirely. The warning lights are well and truly on, and they are blinking, but the Government’s response has been achingly slow.
Let us think about how we got here. The business model for dentistry is straightforward. There has always been a balance between NHS work and private work, but, over time, stagnation in payment for NHS work has led to that balance shifting inexorably towards private work. That is not the fault of dentists—they have people to employ, lights to keep on and bills to pay at home. It is a result of, as I said, ministerial disinterest in the funding model. We know from senior dentists that the Government has, in their words, had its head in the sand.
I note that the Government has, once again, referenced the impact of the pandemic. The pandemic has, of course, had an impact. We know that that is, in large part, why there has been a backlog of procedures. However, as Paul Gray, the former chief executive of NHS Scotland, said, the crisis in our NHS, including in dentistry, was always coming—Covid just hastened the date.
The Government talks in lofty tones about protecting our NHS from privatisation. It rightly speaks of prescription charges being a tax on the sick. However, under the Scottish National Party-Green Government, thousands of people are denied the dental treatment that they desperately need. Why are they denied it? It is because they simply cannot afford to pay for private treatment, which is the only other option available to them.
Of those who responded to a United Kingdom-wide poll that was conducted by my party last year, a quarter of people said that they were forced to pay for private dental treatment. Many people said that they delayed seeing a dentist despite suffering pain. When the pain got too bad, many of those who could not afford to go private turned to DIY dentistry. That means that they carried out dental work on themselves or asked somebody equally unqualified to do it for them.
Last year, a staggering one in five people who failed to get an NHS dental appointment resorted to that. Imagine that. We are not living in the dark ages; this is 21st century Scotland. The fact that so many people are being forced to take such a measure is a national scandal and an absolute indictment—