Chamber and committees

I am at risk of going over this ground again. The minister said that we have a strong model and that the situation would get a lot worse if we moved to a different system, but the reality is that my dentist had not been in touch with me since before Covid until I wrote to them. That dentist has stopped doing reminders.

My level of dental care cannot get lower, and that is in Glasgow—a city. We had people along from Shetland who said that their system is not working. They have one practice and a director of dentistry. Why is a director of dentistry needed for one practice? I do not understand that.

We have heard evidence that the present system is not working. Mr Notman suggests that it would be worse if we moved to the capitation model, because practices might move away from the NHS or be destabilised, but we are picking up a strong drift away from the NHS—that is not necessarily in the numbers but in the fact that, for example, the practice that I go to has stopped sending reminders and others have deregistered patients, although my practice has not. We seem to be getting that across the board.

When people speak to medical students, those students are wondering not whether they will work in the NHS but whether they will go into hospital or GP practice, which is an issue. However, when people speak to dental students, those students say, “We don’t even want to go into the NHS.” Do you accept that something is fundamentally wrong?

I will ask one more question, which is on a slightly different tack. Do we know the state of the nation’s oral health? You have told us that you check kids’ teeth in P1 and P7 and you know that a percentage have or do not have decay. Do we know the position for adults?

That is very positive, so it is a good note for me to finish on.

Is Edinburgh difficult because you are competing with other delivery companies?

Do you think that Brexit has had an impact on that?

So there would be job reductions purely linked to the letters, but you hope that that would be compensated for elsewhere.

You mentioned the competition, and clearly many of the changes in Royal Mail are linked to the fact that you have all that competition out there. What do you do better than the competition, or what do they do better than you?

Is there still more trust in Royal Mail than in any of the competition?

Thanks very much.

I presume that the job reductions would be evenly spread across the country, because if everybody goes down from six to five days—