National Audit Office: Investigation into the NHS dental recovery plan (27 November 2024)

Summary

This report sets out information on the current delivery of NHS dentistry services and the development and progress of the plan for 2024-25. It looks at:

• access to NHS dentistry before the plan
• development of the 2024 dental recovery plan
• the government’s progress against the dental recovery plan’s objectives and plans for evaluation.

It concludes that the dental recovery plan aspires to deliver more than an additional 1.5 million courses of treatment in 2024-25 but is not currently on course to do so. Even if these additional courses of treatment are delivered by the end of 2024-25, the plan would still mean that 2.6 million fewer courses of treatment would have been delivered than in 2018-19.