Getting an NHS dentist in England now 'almost impossible', damning report finds

Universal dentistry has been “lost” according to worrying new research which shows 600 practices have stopped seeing NHS patients.

The scale of dentists handing back their NHS contracts and going private is today revealed in analysis for the Mirror ’s Dentists for All campaign . The most comprehensive ever study of the decade-long oral health crisis by the respected Nuffield Trust thinktank concludes - “NHS dental care is hard to find in England, if not impossible”.

One in ten dental practices, or 608 in total, have abandoned their NHS contract since March 2017 in England. This includes a loss of 135 NHS practices since 2024 - the year Labour came to power.

A Mirror special report today publishes accounts from a pensioner who lives in pain because he cannot get an NHS dentist, as well as a former NHS dentist who explains why he has gone private.

New polling of 2,000 adults also shows the vast majority of the public are in favour of Labour fixing NHS dentistry through extra funding, following a decade of real-terms cuts under the Tories.

Mark Dayan, policy analyst at the Nuffield Trust, said: “The retreat of NHS dentistry was never an announcement or a policy. There has been no closure programme for citizens to oppose and no single decision to reduce the service. The loss of universal care happened through practices deciding for themselves that NHS work is no longer worth doing.

“A contract handed back in one town attracts little national attention on its own but repeated across the country for a decade, it amounts to the quiet transformation of dentistry into a two-tier service, in which access to dentistry increasingly rests on what people can afford to pay and what postcode they live in.”

The Nuffield report established the number of registered NHS dentists in England in March each year, dating back to 2017. Back then there were 6,262 dentists who saw NHS patients.

Latest data shows this had fallen to 5,654 by March 2026. This is before factoring in the trend of dentists reducing the proportion of NHS patients they see but still treating some.

Nuffield researchers established that 10,160 dental practices are now operating in England – an increase of over 400 in the previous decade. However the share of these offering NHS general dental services has dropped from 64.6% to 55.6%.

Practices without a general NHS contract – largely private or specialist NHS services – have risen by over 1,000.

More dentists are handing back their NHS contracts in the South West and the East of England. The report highlights how these regions are also seeing the biggest growth in private dental practices.

It states: “Dental capacity has not disappeared from these places, but it has moved beyond the reach of anyone who cannot pay for it. This is not a shortage of dentistry so much as a shortage of NHS dentistry.”

Retired shopkeeper Mike Wood told how he has “a mouth full of gaps” and lives in chronic pain because he cannot get an NHS dentist.