Feryal Clark Shadow Minister (Health and Social Care)

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to reduce oral health inequality.

Neil O'Brien The Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Health and Social Care

The Department of Health and Social Care is taking a number of steps to reduce oral health inequalities. We announced that we will consult on water fluoridation expansion across the North East which would extend water fluoridation to up to 1.6 million additional individuals.

We also announced a package of improvements to the NHS dental system in July 2022 and set out further detail on this in ‘Our plan for patients’, to improve access and better target care for patients with higher oral health needs and we are taking measures to reduce sugar consumption, such as the sugar levy

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The Department has published a number of resources to support local authorities in assessing and improving the oral health of children and vulnerable older people and is working locally with local authorities on this. These can be viewed at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/oral-health