I am rather dismayed that the Presiding Officer cut the minister off, because I wanted to hear how the bombshell of independence was going to in any way improve any aspect of healthcare in this country.

A whole year ago, the Liberal Democrats used our one day of Opposition debate time to raise the crisis in NHS dentistry. During that debate, Maree Todd said:

“NHS dental services are on the road to recovery.”—[

Official Report

, 8 February 2023; c 40.]

We are a year on and, in large tracts of Scotland, NHS dentistry is dead on arrival—there is no question about that.

As we have heard in today’s debate, there is a crisis in NHS dental care in this country. My party warned the Government about it last February but, in the interim, the Government has done very little to stop the rot. I do not remember an occasion when we have debated the subject in Government time.

The fundamental flaw to the Government’s rebuttal in the debate is that, once again, it leans on the global pandemic as an excuse for the problems that we see in NHS dental care. While that may be true for the delays in treatment that people suffered as a result of the hard stop on aerosol-generating procedures during the months of lockdown, it does not explain why so many of our dental practitioners are leaving the NHS profession and leaving the delivery of NHS care. That has nothing to do with the pandemic.

In truth, the SNP has abandoned NHS dentistry. Although changes have been made to the payment structure for NHS dentists—as Government members were quick to talk about today—it is not enough. We should listen to the British Dental Association, which says that that is tinkering with a structure whose fundamentals are structurally unsound.

I say to Government back benchers that they should look at their casework bags—I do not believe that they are not getting what I am getting. Like Willie Rennie and others, I have heard testimony from my constituents, unbidden and unrequested, that is awash with human pain. I hear more and more every day from constituents who are struggling to get an appointment, including one with a 14-month-old baby who cannot get registered. Another constituent, who was unable to get an appointment after several attempts, said:

“it saddens me that the NHS dentistry service is so much worse now than it was when I was a young child in the 1960s and 1970s”.

Willie Rennie gave us a litany of human suffering from his casework bag in North East Fife. He is not alone. This is not a case of dentists leaving the profession or NHS dental care because of some rush to capitalism or profiteering; it is symptomatic of a fee structure model that is fundamentally no longer fit for purpose, and which the British Dental Association has been crying out for the Government to address for a long time.

As Willie Rennie rightly said, far from NHS dental charges being scrapped in their entirety, people who can still access NHS dental treatment are seeing an increase in charges. Shame on the Government.

We have produced solutions in our motion. First, we must engage with the dental profession on a fundamental redesign of the fee structure. We should also look to registration. The minister was quite quick to address Willie Rennie’s point and say that that is a reserved matter. However, it is not only the General Dental Council that deals with registration; the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow and the similar body in Edinburgh are also empowered to deal with it. Let us work with them to make it easier for foreign workers to come and deliver dental care.

Fundamentally, we need to reform the recovery plan not only for dentistry but for primary care. As we heard in the earlier debate this afternoon, the recovery plan is no longer worth the paper that it is written on, and clinicians across the board are crying out for the Government to change it. The cabinet secretary made his protestations that he had taken on board our plan, but that will be cold comfort to the constituents whom we have heard about today.

Sandesh Gulhane was right to expand on the extreme measures that people are being driven to. When our Ukrainian refugee guests, who have sought safe harbour in Scotland, are prepared to brave the Shahed drones and Iskander missiles of downtown Kyiv to access dental care for want of an NHS dentist in this country, something is fundamentally wrong.

We heard several times about the important early warning system that dental care can offer. If oral cancer is caught early, it is eminently survivable, but the time that we are asking our patients to wait between appointments means that the early warning signals and vital clinical signs are being missed.

Paul Sweeney’s speech was excellent. He was absolutely right to point to the fact that we know the empirical measurement of how extreme things are in communities, when 83 per cent of our dentists are telling us that they have patients in their practice for whom they are having to deliver remedial work for botched DIY dental work that patients have tried to undertake on themselves. Things are Dickensian—it is terrible and it is extreme.

Liam McArthur was right to say that lists will not open to registration. Any tinkering around the edges might have changed things or stopped the exodus, but lists will not be opened to registration for new patients.

For those in our casework examples—the constituents whom we all know of—who have been jettisoned from NHS care or have moved into an area, the damage is already done. They are out in the wilderness and nobody is looking after their teeth.

In a typically refreshing speech, Fergus Ewing gave the lie to all the Government back benchers who are clearly not attending to their casework in-trays. David Torrance was the most extreme example of that, given that he was not even aware that his own surgery was closing to new patients.

I am aware that you want me to close, Presiding Officer. [

Interruption

.]

It is emblematic of the rot that has set in—[

Interruption

.]