What does the pledge mean? 

In its 2024 election manifesto, the Labour Party 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.

The DHSC has 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?

We’re currently rating this pledge as “In progress”. Although the DHSC has now set out its expectations, NHS commissioners will be in different stages of planning and delivery, with some likely in the very early days of planning.

NHS England has confirmed it will not mandate an approach to the delivery of the extra appointments, meaning this will likely vary from region to region.

There is currently no national service specification or clinical guidance—important documents that outline how and what care should be delivered. NHS England wrote to ICBs in February confirming this will be published in due course.

The government has said that NHS England will monitor ICB’s progress directly, but it doesn’t look like any data will be published on this, so it’s unclear how progress can be measured publicly.

We’ve not been able to find official figures on the number of dental appointments offered, 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, which can 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.

Data on the number of courses of dental treatment covering the period since Labour came into government hasn’t yet been published.