Editorial: Dentistry provision in Northern Ireland needs reform as much as other welfare services

​As if there were not enough crises, a dentistry crisis is highlighted today.

A Nuffield Trust report out this morning says the “widespread crisis” requires a “huge injection” of funds.

Most people in Northern Ireland, and the rest of the UK, will already have a sense of the problem: rapidly declining NHS dentistry provision, as if the care of teeth has been privatised, with a growing share of the population paying for treatment.

Dentists are also quitting, according to Tristen Kelso of the British Dental Association in NI. This is why it is hard to find a dentist.

The Labour Party has a plan, that includes both extra funding and prevention (supervised brushing for young children). But Labour is as much a part of the problem as the Tories. Stormont parties are no better. None are prepared to level with the public about the limits to free provision in a range of public services, about the need for efficiencies and for charging.

Dentistry is one of three related areas of the vital welfare net that need radical reform – overall health provision and care being the other two. Stormont for 25 years has presided over increasingly inefficient hospital provision, and the whole UK has failed to get to grips with old age care. Both are ever more costly due to huge gains in life expectancy. The latter is a monstrously unfair system in which some people lose modest life savings because they have to go into a home and others pay nothing because through luck they maintain their independence.

The whole UK, let alone Stormont, will not even discuss the ruinous cost of public sector pensions. Instead, they show near unanimous support for striking public sector workers, without pointing out the pensions that such workers enjoy pensions their private sector counterparts will never get.

Change is needed in all areas, both in efficiencies but also raised public contributions towards some benefits.