What does the pledge mean?

In its 2024 election manifesto, Labour pledged to deliver an additional 700,000 urgent dental appointments. In February 2025, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) outlined the scope and timeframe.

From April 2025, integrated care boards (ICBs)—the NHS bodies that commission health services for regions in England—will be expected to purchase 700,000 additional urgent care appointments, to be delivered by the end of the 2025/26 financial year.

The NHS will be expected to repeat this each year for the duration of this parliament.

These appointments will be targeted at “dental deserts”—in other words, the areas with the greatest unmet need. The DHSC said these areas have been identified by “looking at how many people tried and failed to get an NHS dentist appointment”. It said the extra appointments will be given to patients who are likely to be in pain or in need of urgent treatment.

In February 2025, the DHSC published a list outlining exactly how many appointments each NHS area is required to deliver.

This pledge refers to England only, as health is devolved, so the UK government does not have responsibility for the NHS in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

What progress has been made?

In July 2025, the government set out several reforms to the NHS dentistry contract with a view to delivering on the manifesto commitment, including requiring newly qualified dentists to work in the NHS for a minimum period and introducing “long-term and planned pathways” to support patients with “significant dental decay and/or significant gum disease”.

The DHSC opened a consultation on its proposed reforms to the public, healthcare professionals and relevant organisations. The consultation period will run until mid-August. The full list of reforms open to consultation can be found here.

And in the June 2025 Spending Review, the Treasury confirmed it would allocate some money to help deliver this pledge; however, details on how much will be allocated within each department is currently undetermined.

In February 2025, the DHSC set out some expectations relating to urgent appointments, with NHS England confirming it will not mandate an approach to the delivery of the extra appointments, meaning how the appointments are delivered will likely vary from region to region. According to the Department, ICBs have been making extra appointments available from 1 April 2025. A service specification—a document outlining how ICBs should deliver on the pledge—was published in May.

NHS England will monitor ICBs’ progress directly, with data to be published here.

We’ve not been able to find official figures on the number of dental appointments offered by the NHS, but the British Dental Association told us that the closest proxy in official data is NHS figures on the number of courses of dental treatment. However, these can cover multiple appointments. They include examination of a patient’s oral health, the planning of any treatment or the provision of that treatment.

In 2023/24, the NHS in England delivered around 34 million courses of dental treatment. Of these, 3.7 million were recorded as urgent.

To put that in perspective, a costing document produced by the DHSC in February 2024 (when Labour was still in opposition) estimated that the promised 700,000 additional appointments would allow staff to perform an extra 324,000 courses of treatment.