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Thousands more patients will be able see dentists thanks to an additional 2,000 practitioners hired from overseas, Health Minister Stephen Kinnock has told LBC.
Mr Kinnock said the move will open up appointments across the country by boosting places on two professional registration exams and plugging the “significant number of vacancies in our dental workforce”.
Speaking to LBC’s Deputy Political Editor Aggie Chambre, Mr Kinnock explained: “We are announcing today big increases in the dentistry workforce.
“First of all, we are changing the way that overseas qualified dentists can get registered.
“They have to take an exam to do that, the Overseas Registration Examination and another exam called the LDS.
"And we are significantly increasing the numbers that will be able to go through that system more rapidly.
“There's currently a very large backlog of those who've not been able to take the exam. And thanks to the action that we're taking, we're going to see an additional 2,000 or just over 2,000 overseas qualified dentists getting onto the front line into dentist surgeries by 2027/28.”
But it comes as Labour launches a tough crackdown on migration. Last week, Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood defended changes coming in retrospectively to migrants who are already in the UK.
However, Mr Kinnock insisted that the increase in foreign workers “won't in any way be a burden on our welfare state, on our housing or infrastructure”.
“They'll be very well paid individuals, they will add a lot of value and we will, as a result, be able to get more people into dental chairs,” he said.
"We've also found that overseas qualified dentists do a disproportionate amount of NHS work compared to others. So I think this is going to be good news for NHS dentistry and there is plenty of scope and space in the dentistry market to bring more dentists onto the front line."
He added that 50 more dental school places will be trained every year for “homegrown talent”, marking the first increase since 2007.
When asked whether 50 more dentists a year is enough, he replied: “We're investing an additional 11 million pounds a year for those 50 places, so we're going up from 810 places to 860 places.
“It's frankly pretty shocking that the government, since 2007, no government has made this investment in our young people, enabling more of them to come and learn dentistry.
“It's a five year course and leads to an extremely valuable and valued qualification and that is absolutely the right thing to do alongside the work we're doing to enable those who are ready to do the overseas registration exam and the lds to clear that backlog and get more dentists onto the front line.
"I think it's also a signal about what the government's priorities are. And this government is prioritising NHS dentistry, prioritising the dental workforce, prioritising better dentistry treatment for people who desperately need it after 14 years of conservative neglect and incompetence."