To ask the Minister of Health whether he will task officials to undertake a needs analysis of Community Dental Services (CDS) to ensure demand is aligned with capacity, as recommended by a recent British Dental Association roundtable event focusing on CDS Workforce issues.

A needs analysis of the Community Dental Service (CDS) is currently under consideration as part of a wider assessment of the future remit of the Service. High quality data on population health is a key element of needs assessment and, while SPPG and Trusts have made significant progress in gathering population oral health data, this work is not yet complete across the main CDS patient groups.

The British Dental Association convened a CDS Workforce Roundtable event in September 2025 and this was attended by representatives from my Department, SPPG as well as the CDS. A central recommendation emerging from this event was that a Trust‑led service analysis should be the first step in exploring the gap between local demand and capacity. However, the main challenge in establishing a clear demand‑capacity position for CDS remains the absence of reliable and comparable activity data from Trusts. Addressing this is the immediate focus of SPPG’s CDS‑related work, and it is expected that standardised information will be available from Trusts in the near future.A regional meeting between SPPG, the CDO and Trust representatives is scheduled for February 2026 to discuss the future scope of CDS services. This meeting will help establish a consistent regional understanding of the CDS remit and will support the standardisation of data collection and data interpretation.