Stephen Kinnock MP: speeches 2026

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Speeches

16 Mar 2026 · GP Contract · Hansard source
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I thank the right hon. Gentleman, but that is precisely what we have been doing. We said in our manifesto that we would bring back the family doctor. We said we would hire 1,000 more GPs to the frontline and we have delivered 2,000. When we came into office in July 2024 there was a bizarre situation where demand for access to GPs was spiralling, yet the additional roles reimbursement scheme, designed under the previous Government, was not for GPs. It was for physician associates and anybody else in the practice, but not for GPs. We have bulldozed that bureaucracy and invested £82 million in getting the ARRS up and running and fit for purpose. As a result, we have 2,000 more GPs and 1,600 more full-time equivalents through this contract.
16 Mar 2026 · GP Contract · Hansard source
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A number of things have happened which will help with access to GPs. One is the very significant increase in the number of GPs we have put on the frontline and another is online access. We are now dealing with the 8 am scramble by ensuring we do not have a choke point on the telephone lines because more and more people are able to use online access. On capabilities in terms of physical infrastructure, a very important part of that is our commitment to neighbourhood health. There will be 120 new neighbourhood health centres by the end of this Parliament, which will really help to deliver the hospital-to-community shift that I am sure my hon. Friend’s constituents are looking forward to.
16 Mar 2026 · GP Contract · Hansard source
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Clearly, a lot of change is happening in the system, but that is because a lot of change was required. Frankly, we have to do what we are doing if we are going to get the NHS back on its feet and fit for the future, with the three big shifts set out in our 10-year plan. Part of that is about the structure. Our view is that we can consolidate more of the back-office activity, which will free up more resources and allow us to do more on the frontline. ICBs play a vital role in that, particularly in commissioning. We want to see more strategic commissioning and more resource and expertise put into the parts of the ICB that are delivering better outcomes in population health. We must also see less duplication and more streamlining of back-office functions. It is about getting more efficiency but also being more responsive to patients and practitioners on the frontline.
16 Mar 2026 · GP Contract · Hansard source
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My hon. Friend and I have had some discussions about GP practices in her constituency, and I know she is doing excellent work to ensure that performance is always being driven in the right direction. She asks what we are doing right across the country; the Carr-Hill formula will be a nationwide initiative, and the contract itself is also nationwide. It is important that the Government do not try to micromanage and that ICBs and trusts work together. We are there to set the framework and ensure that everybody is clear about the outcomes; it is then up to the people at the coalface to deliver those outcomes. We do need to know where that is not working, so perhaps we could look at my hon. Friend’s survey once she has it; it would be a good way of checking in and ensuring that there is a golden thread between the outcomes that we want to see and the delivery on the ground.
16 Mar 2026 · GP Contract · Hansard source
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My hon. Friend makes such an important point about paying tribute to the incredible work that our GPs and their teams do right across the length and breadth of our country, including in Gedling; he is an excellent champion for his constituency. This is about marrying investment with reform. In addition to the £1.1 billion in the previous contract, the £485 million this year and the measures I mentioned to recruit more GPs to the frontline, there is also very important work happening around the shift from treatment to prevention in the 10-year plan. We are boosting childhood vaccination rates, providing better care for patients living with obesity and requiring GPs to share data with the lung cancer screening programme. This is about incentivising GPs, working with them as partners as we move forward into the modernisation of our health service.
16 Mar 2026 · GP Contract · Hansard source
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On prevention, there are some really important measures in the contract: in essence, we are recalibrating the quality outcomes framework, which is the basis for payments to incentivise the actions that GPs take. By changing the QOF, as it is called, we can shift that in one direction or the other, and we have changed it to incentivise boosting childhood vaccination rates, particularly in those areas of the country where vaccination rates are worryingly low, and better care for patients living with obesity. That is about exactly the things the hon. Member just mentioned: prescribing, if you like, exercise regimes and advising on better nutrition. We are also changing the QOF to require GPs to share data with the lung cancer screening programme. Those are just three examples of what we are doing within the contract. On online access, it is clear that there must always be three channels of access to a GP—walk-in, telephone and online—and that for an urgent matter it would be a walk-in or a telephone call. What has really worked is that online access has taken pressure off the telephone lines as people who do not have urgent requirements have been migrating online and using the NHS app—take-up of the app is also excellent—so we are moving in the right direction.
16 Mar 2026 · GP Contract · Hansard source
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The key point here is that GPs are the clinicians whom we trust to define what urgent means. There are, of course, a number of criteria and conditions that will ring an extra alarm bell and ensure that the patient is registered as urgent. It is worth mentioning that 46% of all GP appointments already take place on the same day as contact is made with the surgery—with the majority of those classified as urgent—so performance is already good. This is not something new that we are landing on general practice; it is much more about ensuring that we have a clear line of sight into who the urgent patients are and ensuring that they get treatment on the first day.
16 Mar 2026 · GP Contract · Hansard source
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I am not familiar with the details of that specific case, but if the hon. Member writes to me, I will be more than happy to furnish her with a response. There is a real concern in some parts of the country, particularly where there have been new developments or populations moving into the area, that the GP practice does not have the required capacity. I am not sure whether that has happened in the case she refers to, but in such cases we also look to developers, including to section 106 and the community infrastructure levy as an opportunity. We have the primary care utilisation fund, and with neighbourhood health centre funding coming on stream, that may also be an opportunity. If she cares to write to me, I will furnish her with a response.
16 Mar 2026 · GP Contract · Hansard source
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My hon. Friend is a doughty campaigner for his constituents. I am not familiar with the details of the case that he mentions, but I would be happy to look into it; if he would write to me, we can take that further.
16 Mar 2026 · GP Contract · Hansard source
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I thank the hon. Gentleman for the GP-related questions, for which I was grateful when he finally got to them. On clinical evidence for advice and guidance, I think that the evidence speaks for itself. We introduced advice and guidance in the last contract with an £80 million investment, and it has been a stunning success. Take-up across the country has been huge, and—this is the statistic that matters most of all—1.3 million referrals that would otherwise have gone to electives have been dealt with by GPs. [Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman, who is chuntering from a sedentary position, seems not to care about what actually matters for patients, but through advice and guidance they are able to get a response from their GPs within about 48 hours. I can assure him that it takes a great deal longer to secure an out-patient appointment. If he is looking for statistics on advice and guidance, let me give him that one again: 1.3 million referrals have been taken off electives and dealt with by GPs. That is part of the hospital-to-community shift. The hon. Gentleman asked for a definition of “urgent”. We trust our clinicians. We know that general practitioners are experts in their field. They know when they see an urgent issue, but they also know that that the symptoms might be a more acute manifestation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or that a child’s rash suddenly looks more dangerous than it did the day before. We trust our GPs to make those decisions, and it is a real pity that Opposition Members do not seem to do the same. The hon. Gentleman also wanted a statistic in relation to access. In July 2024, patient satisfaction with access to a GP was languishing at a miserable 60% after 14 years of Tory neglect and chaos. Today it stands at 76%, which is a 16 percentage point improvement. The hon. Gentleman asked for statistics; perhaps he should take that statistic and deal with it.
16 Mar 2026 · GP Contract · Hansard source
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Very much along the lines of what I said to the hon. Member for Gosport (Dame Caroline Dinenage), we need to ensure that the social infrastructure is there in such areas of population growth. I would be more than happy to meet my hon. Friend to discuss that further.
16 Mar 2026 · GP Contract · Hansard source
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Please do pass on my thanks to the Laurie Pike and al-Shafa practices for the outstanding work they do. We are not really doing ringfencing; we are embedding prevention in the contract through the quality outcomes framework. Those incentives are the best way to give practices the flexibility they need while ensuring that they are clear about what we expect in terms of outcomes. Issues such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes are part of the quality outcomes framework. It is also worth mentioning the Pharmacy First scheme, which is looking to move some of this work out of GPs and enabling pharmacists to operate at the top of their practice. That is another example of the shift from hospital to community, which is so important in enabling people to get the best possible care in the right place at the right time, as close as possible to their homes.
16 Mar 2026 · GP Contract · Hansard source
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The right hon. Gentleman makes a very important point about bureaucracy. Many of the reforms that we are pushing for in the contract are designed to reduce bureaucracy. For example, by moving to a single point of access and embedding advice and guidance in the contract, we will reduce the number of transactions. In the current system, the practice needs to put in a request for a £20 payment each time it provides advice and guidance; we are embedding that and streamlining it. The other point to make is that at the heart of our 10-year plan is the shift from analogue to digital. I have seen some extraordinarily effective artificial intelligence technology around ambient voice services, which enable an entire consultation to be recorded and put directly into the system, thereby saving the GP hours at the end of the day in writing up notes.
16 Mar 2026 · GP Contract · Hansard source
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When we came into office, we found GP services in an appalling state—underfunded, understaffed and in crisis. Since July 2024, this Government have been fixing the front door to the NHS, investing more than £100 million to fix up GP surgeries this year, making online booking available to patients across the country and recruiting 2,000 more GPs who are now serving patients on the frontline. Following investment in advice and guidance, we have seen 1.3 million diverted referrals since April 2025. Those are people who would have otherwise been added to the electives waiting list. A lot has been done, but there is a lot more still to do. We are determined to make the system fairer for coastal communities and deprived areas, so we have launched a review into the Carr-Hill formula to close the gap on health disparities and ensure that funding is targeted on the basis of need. We will shortly update the House in the usual way on our Carr-Hill review. Last year’s GP contract saw the biggest cash increase in more than a decade, and this year we are investing an additional £485 million, taking the total investment made through the contract to more than £13.8 billion this financial year. Investment must always be combined with reform, so the new contract will improve access for patients by requiring that all clinically urgent requests are dealt with on the same day. It will provide a mechanism to hire even more GPs via a new practice-level reimbursement scheme, and it will support the shift from treatment to prevention, as set out in our 10-year plan, through incentives to boost childhood vaccination rates, better care for patients living with obesity and requiring GPs to share data with the lung cancer screening programme. These ideas were not cooked up by someone sat behind a desk in Whitehall. What is happening is that we are taking the best of the NHS to the rest of the NHS, working with pioneering practices that have been doing these things for a long time. Today we can see that our policies are working, and after years of decline in general practice, we are getting the front door back on its hinges. Patient satisfaction with general practice is finally moving in the right direction. According to the Office for National Statistics, almost 77% of people described contacting their GP as easy in January this year, up from just 60%, where it was languishing in July 2024. I know that when he gets up, the hon. Member for Hinckley and Bosworth (Dr Evans) will hugely welcome, as will his hon. Friends, the progress that we are making.
16 Mar 2026 · GP Contract · Hansard source
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I think the first part of the hon. Member’s question is connected to the second part, because, as he correctly points out, thanks to the 14 years of neglect and incompetence that we saw, the Carr-Hill formula became a very anachronistic way of sharing funding. It should be based on need, but it was based on very outdated statistics and data. We are fixing that, and the changes that we are making will be felt by his constituents. It is disappointing to hear that he has had that feedback, because it does not reflect the nationwide polling from the Office for National Statistics, which shows that satisfaction with access, which was languishing at 60% in July 2024, now stands at 76%.
16 Mar 2026 · GP Contract · Hansard source
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I am not able to pre-empt the Carr-Hill review, but we have had a system based on data that is often 25 years old. Of course, we know that the Conservatives have the Tunbridge Wells philosophy. We will always recall the former Prime Minister standing in front of Conservative party members and proudly proclaiming the fact that he had been taking money out of parts of the country that needed it most and pumping it into those parts of the country that were delivering his pork barrel politics.
16 Mar 2026 · GP Contract · Hansard source
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I thank the hon. Member for his kind words about the Government’s work. I do have an excellent relationship with the Minister in Northern Ireland. Devolution is vital to the Government, and we are certainly not in the business of trying to micromanage what is happening both across the regions of England and in the devolved nations of our United Kingdom, but it is clear that there should be learning in both directions. When I speak to the Northern Ireland Minister, we are clear that we want to see the best possible performance and outcomes right across our United Kingdom. I look forward to continuing to work with him on that basis.
16 Mar 2026 · GP Contract · Hansard source
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The guidance on neighbourhood health will be published very soon indeed; it is almost complete, and is coming soon. We recognise that general practice will be right at the heart of neighbourhood health, so we have to ensure a single neighbourhood provider contract and a multi-neighbourhood provider contract that are aligned with the best value that we can deliver, both for the taxpayer and in terms of patient outcomes. We will also be consulting on the single neighbourhood provider and multi-neighbourhood provider, with the consultation process starting some time after the overarching neighbourhood guidance, which is coming out very soon.
10 Mar 2026 · Adult Cerebral Palsy: National Service Specification · Hansard source
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It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Jardine. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Daniel Francis) for securing this important debate. Many Members in this House speak on issues of importance to their constituents; far fewer bring the depth of personal experience, the understanding and the long-term perspective that he has of this issue. His own experiences of caring for a child with cerebral palsy reflect the realities faced every day by parents and carers across the country, and he speaks with such compassion and authority. Adults with cerebral palsy make up a significant but often overlooked part of our population—around 130,000 people across the UK. For far too long, they have been “invisible to the NHS”, in the words of the cerebral palsy charter. Although cerebral palsy is a lifelong neurological condition, we frequently see well-structured, multidisciplinary paediatric care systems simply evaporating when people reach the age of 18. Adults are left navigating a fragmented system with no clear pathways, limited specialist input and inconsistent recognition of their needs. We know that adults with cerebral palsy face disproportionately high risks of chronic pain, fatigue, mobility loss, falls, respiratory illness and cardiovascular disease—harms that are preventable with co-ordinated, proactive care. Young adults who have both cerebral palsy and a learning disability often receive better support, because they can access well-established learning disability pathways that provide structured reviews, specialist teams and co-ordinated care. By contrast, young adults with cerebral palsy alone often fall outside those pathways, and therefore struggle to access the same level of timely, proactive support, despite having significant and lifelong needs. On the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford made about ringfenced funding, we expect ICBs to commission services for people with cerebral palsy based on local population need, and informed by NICE guidance and national service specifications. That approach is consistent with the wider NHS financial framework, which does not create condition-specific funding pots, but rather supports local systems to make evidence-based decisions across all long-term conditions. Similarly, on extending the qualities and outcomes framework, or QOF, to incorporate the creation of general practice-level cerebral palsy registers, we are operating in a very challenging fiscal environment. QOF indicators must be evidence based, deliverable at a national scale and balanced against the need to reduce administrative pressures on general practice. Current policy is that ICBs should use NICE guidance and national service specifications to commission appropriate local services, rather than creating condition-specific national incentives. Although we have no plans at present to commission any formal gap analysis of adherence to, or non-compliance with, NICE guidelines, I wish to remind all ICBs of their responsibilities and the importance of adhering to those guidelines. NHS England’s revised service specification for adult specialised neurology services, which was published in August last year and comes into effect next month, represents an important step forward in improving care for adults with cerebral palsy. For the first time, it sets clear expectations for how people with lifelong neurological conditions, including cerebral palsy, should move between general practice, community services and specialist centres. The specification requires integrated care boards and specialist centres to organise services using a population health approach, ensuring equitable access to both general and specialist neurology services and oversight from multidisciplinary teams. That means better communication between GPs and specialist services, clearer and more consistent referral pathways and stronger recognition that cerebral palsy is a lifelong condition that requires timely review and escalation when needs change. On cerebral palsy specifically, the service specification mandates a networked, multidisciplinary model for adult cerebral palsy care, emphasising integrated care pathways, structured transition from ages 13 to 14 and annual reviews for complex needs. It ensures equitable access to specialists, specialised treatments such as botulinum toxin and requires services to address physical and communicative barriers to care. Those changes will directly support early intervention, reduce unwarranted variation between local systems and help to embed more proactive, joined-up primary and specialist care, improving outcomes, continuity and quality of life for adults with cerebral palsy. The updated neurology service specification ensures that cerebral palsy is embedded within a broader national framework, strengthening national expectations for adult cerebral palsy care. One of the most important ways we are strengthening support for adults with cerebral palsy is by improving awareness and understanding within primary care. The service specification now requires integrated care boards and specialist centres to work much more closely with GPs, strengthening communication and clarifying referral pathways so that primary care clinicians understand when an adult with cerebral palsy requires specialist review or escalation. That is crucial, because too many adults report difficulty in securing informed support in general practice or face long delays in being referred to clinicians with expertise in neuro-disability. Those new expectations are designed to ensure that GPs have the confidence and the clarity they need to identify emerging concerns, initiate timely investigations and support adults whose needs may change as they age. Importantly, the specification also strengthens national recognition of cerebral palsy as a lifelong condition, helping to embed more consistent, informed support for adults across primary care settings. That includes the requirement for services to identify barriers to access and make reasonable adjustments for disabled people. That is an important safeguard for adults with cerebral palsy, many of whom experience pain, fatigue, visual perceptual changes, challenges or communication needs that can affect their interaction with health services. These reforms ensure that GPs are supported by a clearer national framework, better referral pathways and stronger system expectations. As we have heard from my hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford today, too many adults with cerebral palsy feel that their support drops away as they transition out of paediatric services. That is exactly why the reforms we are delivering through our 10-year health plan are so critical to strengthening the support available for people with cerebral palsy throughout their lives. Our 10-year health plan sets out a vision for a health and care system that is more personalised, more integrated and more proactive for people with long-term and complex conditions, including cerebral palsy. That means moving away from reactive care based on crisis points towards lifelong support that anticipates needs, prevents deterioration and joins up specialist community and primary care services. The plan focuses on delivering more care in the community, making greater use of technology and building a more preventive health service that supports people to stay well for longer. Our 10-year health plan will ensure that people with complex needs are supported to be active participants in their own care. As part of that, 95% of people with complex needs or long-term conditions will have an agreed personalised care plan by 2027. Care plans will be a feature of the developing neighbourhood health service, which will deliver more care in local communities and move away from a one-size-fits-all approach, giving people more power and choice over the care that they receive. Work is under way to determine the definition of complex needs in the context of that target and how care plans will be delivered in the future, including who will be best placed to co-ordinate and support their delivery. We know that key shared decision making is central to patients’ ongoing care, and care plans will look to promote that further. In developing future models of care planning, we will continue to take into account the varied experiences and needs of people with different conditions, such as cerebral palsy. We also recognise the importance of preventive, proactive care, including annual reviews, as recommended in NICE guidance for adults with cerebral palsy. Although not currently mandated through the quality and outcomes framework, those reviews remain an important mechanism for identifying changes in mobility, pain, fatigue and mental health, and for ensuring that people are offered appropriate interventions early. The 10-year health plan’s focus on personalised and proactive care will support integrated care boards to improve access to those reviews as part of a more consistent offer for adults with cerebral palsy. The plan will also ensure that no young person is lost in the gaps between children’s and adult services, a point at which many families tell us that they feel most vulnerable. NHS England’s children and young people transformation programme provides a clear nought-to-25 model of care to achieve that. For young people with cerebral palsy, that means earlier preparation for transition, co-ordinated support from a multidisciplinary network and clearer expectations for how professionals should plan and hand over care. No young adult with cerebral palsy should reach their 18th birthday and face a cliff edge. They have waited far too long for the NHS to acknowledge their existence in policy, planning and commissioning. They deserve the dignity of services that reflect the reality of their lifelong condition. They deserve the best, and we are delivering improvements through integrated, system-wide reforms designed to support lifelong person-centred care. The steps under way provide a more effective and sustainable foundation for improving outcomes for adults with cerebral palsy. Again, I thank and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford for his tireless advocacy and work to ensure that this issue receives the attention that it deserves. I congratulate him, once again, on securing this important debate. Question put and agreed to.
4 Mar 2026 · Healthcare in Rural Areas · Hansard source
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It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq. I congratulate the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Blake Stephenson) on securing this vital debate. I am also grateful to other hon. Members for making excellent contributions this afternoon. We know that the NHS faces pressures all over the country, with rural communities experiencing unique health and wellbeing challenges shaped by geography, demography, infrastructure and access to services. Our 10-year health plan is a commitment to rewire our NHS, with the three shifts to improve access to healthcare for everyone—no matter where you live or how much you earn. Those three shifts—from hospital to community, sickness to prevention and analogue to digital—will support neighbourhood and community health services in getting the investment they need, and will greatly expand and improve access to digital services, bringing healthcare closer to everyone’s home. The hon. Member focused quite a lot of his speech on our emerging neighbourhood health strategy. I will provide some further detail in response to some of his points. He highlighted the important differences between urban and rural. We recognise that neighbourhood services will need to look different across rural and urban areas to best meet the needs of each community. That is why their delivery will be locally led, with local systems determining how neighbourhood health is designed for their area. That work will start in the areas of greatest need, including rural towns and villages. The hon. Member and others also asked about the definition of neighbourhoods in rural areas. First, neighbourhoods are natural communities that are recognisable by local residents. Secondly, neighbourhoods will typically have a population of around 50,000 people, but coherent geography is more important for defining neighbourhoods than population size. Thirdly, the geography of the neighbourhood will be determined locally by integrated care boards in partnership with their strategic partners, particularly local authorities. The hon. Member also asked how rural areas will benefit from neighbourhood health. Neighbourhood health provides the unifying framework that will bring together what is already under way across primary care, community services, urgent care, prevention, digital, estates and population health more broadly. The neighbourhood health service will make it easier for people to access care closer to where they live, including in neighbourhood health centres. Delivery will be locally led, with systems determining how neighbourhood health is designed to meet local population need. That will factor in how services may need to look different across rural and urban areas. The neighbourhood health service will also move us towards a fully digitally enabled health service. We are striving for digital services to improve access, experiences and outcomes for the widest range of people based on their preferences, as any digital healthcare benefit will be limited if people remain digitally excluded. We are working closely with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology on the issues raised around improving access to broadband. To deliver neighbourhood health services, the 10-year health plan introduces two new contracts, including one to create multi-neighbourhood providers covering populations of around 250,000 people. That will unlock the advantages and efficiencies possible from greater-scale working across all GP practices and small neighbourhood providers within the footprint. We will start in the areas of greatest need where healthy life expectancy is lowest, which includes rural towns. By targeting places where healthy life expectancy is lowest, we will deliver healthcare closer to home for those who need it most. Neighbourhood health plans will also be drawn up by local government, the NHS and its partners. The integrated care board will bring those together into a population health improvement plan for its footprint and will use that to inform commissioning decisions. The medium-term planning framework, covering 2026-27 to 2028-29, sets out proposals for the further use of advice and guidance, asking systems to ensure all referrals go through a single point of access. That delivers a robust approach to triage so that patients are cared for closer to home, and there are fewer out-patient appointments in secondary care. That framework will also require a significant reduction in the number of clinically unnecessary follow-ups. Turning to general practice, which came up a lot in the debate, we absolutely recognise the challenges facing rural communities in accessing GP services. We are expanding capacity across England, including to the areas that need it most. We are investing over £480 million extra into GP services this year, including investment in the primary care workforce, ensuring places like Mid Bedfordshire get the resources and GPs that they need. Since October 2024, we have invested £160 million into the additional roles reimbursement scheme, which has supported the recruitment of over 2,000 GPs—smashing our manifesto pledge of 1,000 additional GPs. Furthermore, the introduction of a practice-level GP reimbursement scheme, worth £292 million, will enable practices to hire additional GPs or fund extra sessions with existing GPs. We are also seeing the results of those broad efforts. I am absolutely delighted that patient satisfaction has risen by over 15% since July 2024, from 60% to 75%, and an additional 6.8 million GP appointments have been delivered compared with the same period last year. We know that patients are struggling to access NHS dentistry services, particularly in rural areas. To address that, we are reforming the dental contract to match resources to need and to improve access. As a first step, our 2026 reforms are focused on improving the dental contract to deliver the right care to the right people, including those in rural areas, while incentivising NHS dentists to provide more NHS care, with additional urgent appointments and new pathways for patients with complex needs. We are also continuing to recruit dentists under the golden hello scheme, which offers dentists £20,000 to work in underserved areas. Urgent and emergency care is also a challenge for rural areas. We are ensuring that the country gets the care it needs, when it needs it. We launched our urgent and emergency care plan for 2025-26, supported by a substantial £450 million of capital investment. That will enable the upgrade of hundreds of ambulances and the expansion of urgent and emergency care capacity, reducing A&E wait times and getting more ambulances back on the road, more quickly. Rural adult social care services are really important. Local authorities are responsible for shaping their care markets to meet the diverse needs of local people. However, the Government are also committed to ensuring adult social care funding reflects the costs that different communities face, which is why we have updated the formula used to distribute funding for adult social care to local authorities to include a remoteness adjustment. That means that the funding distribution better reflects the cost of providing care in different parts of the country. To give the local picture in the constituency of the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire, between 2025-26 and 2028-29, central Bedfordshire is set to see its notional allocation for adult social care services increase by £11.3 million, which is more than a 7% cash increase above budgeted adult social care spend. I want to say a quick word on finance. To support remote or sparsely populated areas, the ICB target allocations formula includes an emergency ambulance cost adjustment to reflect longer travel times in sparsely populated areas; a travel time adjustment to the community services formula to reflect the additional time it takes patients to travel between appointments in sparsely populated areas; and an adjustment to support hospitals with 24-hour A&E services that are remote from the wider hospital network and have unavoidably higher costs. Those adjustments help to support rural communities in accessing the health services that they need. I hope that I have managed to touch on some of the issues raised. It is a wide-ranging topic because rural healthcare, by definition, requires many different services. We absolutely recognise the challenges, and we recognise that we still have a mountain to climb before we can get our NHS back on its feet and fit for the future. We believe that through the three shifts—from hospital to community, treatment to prevention and analogue to digital—and the strategies that we are pushing through on workforce, digital, better support for general practice, and neighbourhood health, we can get our NHS back on its feet and fit for the future. Once again, I thank all hon. Members present and I congratulate the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire on securing this debate.
24 Feb 2026 · Access to NHS Dental Services · Hansard source
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I am very sorry to hear about the plight of my hon. Friend’s constituent, and I would be more than happy to look into the specifics of her case. The sad reality is that after 14 years of Tory neglect and incompetence, we have ended up with a two-tier dentistry system. This Government are determined to ensure that high-quality NHS dentistry is available to everyone who needs it. The 2026 reforms that I announced on 16 December will help patients who have complex needs by creating a new care pathway, backed by tariffs for dentists of between £250 and £700, which could save patients up to £225 in fees. Our 2026 measures, combined with long-term contract reform, will indeed enable timely, high-quality treatment that is within financial reach.
24 Feb 2026 · Access to NHS Dental Services · Hansard source
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Our manifesto commitment was about improving access to urgent dental care, and that is precisely what we have done by commissioning hundreds of thousands of additional urgent treatments. It became clear as we were working through that process that the clinical definition was too narrow and out of step with the common-sense interpretation, so we acted on the advice of the chief dental officer and broadened the definition. From this April, urgent care will be embedded in the contract, and of course we continue to work with the sector on long-term contract reform.
24 Feb 2026 · Access to NHS Dental Services · Hansard source
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As I have just pointed out to the hon. Member for Waveney Valley (Adrian Ramsay), we have broadened the definition, because the clinical definition of “urgent” was simply not in line with the common-sense interpretation. People removing their own teeth in DIY dentistry were not fitting into the classification of “urgent”. We have changed that categorisation. As a result of that, I am pleased to confirm that we have delivered 1.8 million additional appointments and treatments this year compared with the same period last year—April to October 2025. We will continue to work on that basis of embedding urgent care into the contract, as I announced on 16 December, in the 2026 reforms that we are carrying out.
24 Feb 2026 · Access to NHS Dental Services · Hansard source
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We know that dentistry was left in crisis by the Conservatives, but this Government are determined to ensure that everyone can access a dentist when they need one. We have recently broadened access to dental appointments, so that patients who need more serious and ongoing treatment no longer miss out. Between April and October 2025, we delivered 1.8 million more treatments than in the same period before the general election.
24 Feb 2026 · Access to NHS Dental Services · Hansard source
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We come to this Chamber month in, month out for these oral questions but we never hear an apology from those on the Opposition Benches for the mess in which they left NHS dentistry. For the Conservatives, sorry really does seem to be the hardest word. With regard to the hon. Gentleman’s question, we have delivered 1.8 million additional appointments between April and October 2025, compared with the same period before the general election. I would be happy to furnish him with the precise numbers of how many more have been provided in his constituency and his ICB area. He can watch his post box for that information.

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