THE shocking state of NHS dental care in East Lancashire is revealed by this newspaper tonight. It is on the brink of total breakdown.

Indeed, the service is so badly gapped now that many people are simply unable to register with a dentist.

In some areas, dental care for adults on the NHS is virtually non-existent.

Elsewhere, patients face waits of months for treatment.

And all this is in a region which already has an abysmal rating in Britain's bad teeth league.

The depressing upshot is that the clock is being put back on dental health.

It has gone from being a right for all to a privilege for those who can afford to pay.

For, apart from the shameful consequence that our children's teeth are among the most rotten in country, the pattern now is of routine neglect of dental health - as those large numbers of people with no dentist never seek treatment unless they suffer a crisis.

Yet, if all this is the dreadful outcome, equally shocking is the fact that it is presided over with official unconcern.

For it is not that our region is without dentists, only that so few of them now treat NHS patients - simply because they cannot afford to. And they cannot be blamed if they cannot make a living from NHS work.

But this sorry state of affairs is no sudden departure. Rather, it is one that the government has been content to let happen for more than three whole years. The now-critical trend of dentists pulling out of NHS work began in 1992 when, bent on public expenditure cuts, the government imposed a seven per cent reduction in their fees.

We asked then whether the government would be prepared to sit back and permit a creeping privatisation to infect the dental sector of the NHS as a result.

Shockingly, they have. For the situation for a large proportion of East Lancashire people today is that only private dental treatment exists - and, worse, that large numbers of them just cannot afford it.

This is quite wrong.

To begin with, like millions of others across the country hit by this run-down in NHS dental care, the people of East Lancashire have paid in advance for their right to treatment - through their National Insurance contributions.

Furthermore, no government can honestly claim that the NHS is safe in their hands if it is prepared to do so little that levels of dental health start to go back to those of the Thirties.

And it is quite sick when, as a deliberate consequence of the government's public spending policy the cuts that are at the root of this crisis, the result is toothache for the poor so that the better-off can have tax cuts.

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