Swindon’s children have, by some distance, the worst team in the joint NHS  area the borough shares with Wiltshire and Bath & North East Somerset, local councillors learned.

And they were also told what the NHS intends to do about it.

A presentation to Swindon Borough Council’s Build a Fairer Swindon policy committee- previously called Combatting Inequality committee - heard that a national survey of Year 6 schoolchildren, 10- to 11-year-olds,  showed that 12.1 per cent of youngsters in the borough had decay in their permanent teeth.

That’s higher than the 9.7 per cent across Wiltshire, and nearly three times worse than the 3.4 per cent in Bath & North East Somerset, dragging the area’s average up to 9.1 per cent.

Victoria Stanely head of primary care dentistry for the BSW integrated care board also told councillors that only 41 per cent of children and 16 per cent of adults in Swindon saw an NHS dentist in the last year or two years respectively.

She added that certain areas and populations had even less access: those in more deprived areas and those from ethnic minority backgrounds.

Ms Stanley and her colleague the director of primary care Jo Cullen outlined the plan to rectify this situation: “The minimum rate for one unit of dentistry will be raised, there will be  ‘golden hello’ payments to support practices in areas where recruitment is particularly challenging and a firmer ringfence on NHS dentistry budgets for 2024 to 2025.

“For children, dental teams will visit primary schools in areas underserved by NHS dentistry and there will be supervised tooth-brushing in schools in the most deprived areas.”

But, Ms Stanley warned, some of the issues with NHS dentistry are long-term and often spring from the contract between the government and dentists settled in 2006.

She said: “Dentistry has often been the poor cousin of primary care. It’s to do with payments, to do with demand, to do with complexity of work.

“Covid-19 did not help as it stopped dentistry with the risk of aerosol-generating procedures.

Ms Cullen added: “Retention of dentists is as important as recruiting new ones and there is a focus on inequalities and communities.

Ms Stanley and Ms Cullen agreed to return to the committee’s next meeting s with updates on progress.