Debate contribution: NHS Dentistry

Debate contribution by Mr Gerry Carroll on 28 April 2026.

MLA

Mr Gerry Carroll

Party at the time

People Before Profit Alliance

Date

28 April 2026

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

NHS Dentistry

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5510156

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I declare an interest: I have a sibling who is a practising dentist. I support the motion — I thank the Members who tabled it — and the amendment from the Alliance Party, although we have to wonder whether another strategy is needed rather than the Minister and the Executive just doing what needs to be done. As the Member opposite said, thousands of our constituents in West Belfast are living in unbearable agony. They are pulling out their own teeth and living with untreated infections because they cannot get access to a dentist that they can afford. How many oral cancer diagnoses have been missed? How many death sentences have effectively been declared because people have been unable to get access to a dentist? This is fundamentally a class issue and a poverty issue. It is a crisis that the Minister and successive Governments have allowed to fester year-on-year without getting a grip on the crisis. Fewer than a million people — just half of the population — are registered with a health service dentist in the North, which is frightening, and almost 400,000 people have been lost since 2023. I do not understand how a patient just gets lost and there is no follow-up action from the Department or a health trust. The mind boggles. The number of health service dental treatments delivered is 40% lower than before the pandemic. Health service dentistry has utterly collapsed, and I would say by design. It is no coincidence that the communities that suffer most are in constituencies such as West Belfast, as was mentioned, and other deprived areas with high levels of poverty and inequality, where private dental fees are unaffordable for working-class families. The link between poverty and poor oral health is well established. Children in deprived areas suffer disproportionately from tooth decay. Untreated dental disease leads to children missing school, missed work appointments and missed hospital admissions, and, quite often, lifelong health consequences and complications. When NHS dentistry crumbles, it is never the wealthy who are left behind.

As I said, the crisis did not appear from nowhere. Almost since the NHS was founded, decades ago, dental care has been coming under sustained attack. Just a year after its creation in 1948, the Labour Government introduced dental prescription fees, while charges for dentures followed in 1951. That slow privatisation has never stopped. Today, under a different Labour Government at Westminster, with a Stormont Executive doing their bidding at home, dentistry is closer than ever to breaking point. I do not think that the alarm bells have gone off in the Department, however. NHS dentists are losing money. They are being forced to subsidise NHS work with private income, and that simply should not be the case. Market solutions created the crisis, and they will never be able to solve it. As the British Dental Association has put it, the service is running on empty. Dentists across the North are either going private or simply giving up. Dentists who spend the majority of their time delivering treatment on the NHS earn, on average, 46% less than those whose work is mostly private. That is unacceptable and, obviously, unsustainable. Dentists are being financially punished for providing public healthcare. The cost-of-service review has still not been published, and it must form the basis of a genuine rebasing of fees and a serious programme of payment reform. Tinkering at the edges is not enough to end the crisis, however. We need full public ownership of dental services, free at the point of use, properly resourced and taken out of the hands of private profit entirely. That is the only permanent solution to the dental emergency.

613 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 15:28 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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