Somerset’s NHS dental crisis exposes Britain’s growing rural divide

People are travelling from miles around to reach new dental practices established in Somerset because the current NHS contract is not up to scratch for rural communities, local MP Adam Dance has told the House of Commons. Another MP, Alison Hume, said only one of 13 dental practices in Scarborough was accepting NHS patients, forcing locals to seek emergency care at a high price.

Opening a debate on the UK dental crisis, Dance claimed that in 2025, 56% of Somerset’s children had gone without a dental appointment. Regarding access to a dentist, 93% of locals surveyed by Dance said they were dissatisfied, while 69% of parents found securing an appointment “very difficult or impossible”.

Hume, MP for another rural constituency, Scarborough and Whitby, said the fact that only one practice in Scarborough was accepting NHS patients had pushed people towards expensive private dental care.

She gave Scarborough constituent John as an example of a man driven to breaking point: “…he had to go private for an emergency extraction and was hit with a £280 bill. That is not just an exorbitant fee…” John was blind and unable to drive elsewhere to seek care.

Dance told the House: “To highlight the scale of the problem, a local dental practice told me that every day, it takes in at least 10 to 15 unplanned emergencies, compared with two or three a few years ago…” He compared the experiences reported by his constituents with horror stories from Dickensian Britain.

Part of the problem lay with an underspend on Somerset’s NHS dental services. In response, Dance and the local NHS worked together to open NHS practices in Wellington, Chard and Crewkerne, bringing dentistry to 20,000 people. Despite these gains, access gaps remained elsewhere. Dance said the county’s dentistry budget had been slashed by 91%, meaning there was not enough money to go around, including in places such as Ilminster and Yeovil.

“What makes people in Yeovil really angry, however, is that we have known what was wrong… We have an underfunded system with an NHS dental contract from 2006 that just does not work…”

Dance said everyone in Yeovil who responded to his survey considered the contract “not fit for purpose”. For his rural constituents, the contract magnified their access problems.

“Dentists cannot prioritise locals. The dental contract means that people do not register with a dentist as they do a GP; they can attend any NHS-funded dental practice… even if the practice is based miles away.”

“If someone lives in Yeovil, Crewkerne or Chard—or in the rest of my constituency—they do not have the right to be permanently registered with their local NHS dental practice.”

“We had people travelling 200 or 300 miles to come to one of our new dental practices, and someone from a mile down the road could not sign up.”

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