Speeches by Kinnock.

“I think we are moving in the right direction. We are clear that we have to have a contract that ensures that everybody who has an urgent need for dental care gets it, that dentists are incentivised and motivated to do NHS work, and that every single penny allocated for NHS dentistry is spent on NHS dentistry. We are qu…”

“My assessment is that we are on a burning platform. We have a moral imperative to fix NHS dentistry in our country. How can it be that we live in a country where the biggest cause of five to nine-year-old children being taken to hospital is to have their decaying teeth removed, when tooth decay is an almost entirely pr…”

“I am sure that officials will want to come in on this, but we are in a constant dialogue with the BDA. I don’t think it is a question of there being a lot of work that we are going to do internally before we start to engage with them. We want to do that as an iterative process, working with the BDA. But we do have to l…”

“I can certainly answer your question in terms of the first steps, because they are more within our control, in the sense that we have got to finalise the financial envelope for dentistry, and that will happen by the end of the summer at the latest. As soon as we have that, we are in a position to draw on some of the an…”

“I am also very happy to respond in writing once the Committee has had a chance to digest it. Please do send in your questions.”

“I think it is really important to say that we are going to do fundamental contract reform in parallel to a number of the other things that we are doing—such as supervised tooth-brushing. Also the consultation that we launched yesterday, which will be around those really important, and I think high-impact, interim refor…”

“We will absolutely be evaluating the programme based on a whole range of indicators, including feedback from teachers and educators, in settings, from parents, and from the evidence of also, for example, things like a reduction in the number of days lost due to tooth decay. Children losing time in school because of too…”

“Our target is to get the 600,000 reached over the course of the school year starting in September. The monitoring process is that the public health authority in each ICB area will be reporting into the ICB, and the ICB will then be reporting in to us. It is similar to what Amanda just set out on the 700,000—there will …”

“Yes. We have used the index of multiple deprivation, the 20% top percentile in terms of the super-outputs of that. We then have agreed the numbers for each ICB and each public health authority, and they have identified the schools where it will start. So yes, we have not micromanaged that from the centre. We have said,…”

“Yes. That is going to launch across the country at the beginning of the school year. We have got now the 23 million toothpastes and toothbrushes that we have secured through that innovative partnership with Colgate-Palmolive. They are being delivered across the country over the course of the summer, and the programme w…”

“I will hand over to colleagues, because they are going to be very closely involved with that, but I am getting a monthly update from officials, and they are updating me on the performance of each of the ICBs. There will be a check and challenge process so that where we see that there may be challenges around hitting th…”

“By 1 April 2026. We will do that every year, and one of the key points of the consultation that we launched yesterday is about how we embed the 700,000 in the NHS contract.”

“The data starts to come in from May, because it is a month-by-month process. We will have that data and be able to publish an update on it over the course of the summer, so there will be publication of the performance of each ICB against the targets that we have set by the end of the summer.”

“I would not agree that there has been a delay. We launched the 700,000 programme on 1 April, and it is happening. Every ICB was given specific targets for the contribution to the additional 700,000 that needed to be made, and we are now closely monitoring the performance of each ICB against those targets.”

“I look forward to having that discussion.”

“You are right: one fundamental principle is around devolution and empowering people who are at the coalface, in terms of making decisions about their local community. The best people to make decisions about the local community are people who are rooted in that local community. The days of us sitting in an ivory tower i…”

“Yes, that is absolutely what I have just said. The sequencing is that we have to now get the final financial envelope for the remainder of this Parliament for dentistry. In parallel to that, we are working on the analysis of what the payment model for the NHS dentistry contract should be—I am sure the officials can sha…”

“I think that, generally speaking, people can see that there is a very robust principle underpinning the tie-in proposal, namely that if the British taxpayer invests £200,000 in educating and training a dentist, that dentist should do some work on the NHS. I do not hear many people arguing with that principle. What they…”

“On tie-ins?”

“Got it—thank you very much, Chair. When we came into Government a year ago, we inherited a system of NHS dentistry that was on its knees. One of the most shocking statistics that I uncovered when I first started looking at the brief was that the biggest cause of children aged five to nine being admitted to hospital in …”