NHS Blew £1.4 Billion Telling Grannies “Sorry Love, No Teeth This Decade”
NHS Dentistry Crisis: £1.4 Billion Spent on Consultants, Not Teeth
(We FOI'd the invoices, cross-checked the spreadsheets, and yeah, it's worse than we thought. Buckle up, Britain – your tax pounds at work, or rather, not.)
The Dental Desert: A Crisis of Access
November 2025: 14 million adults in England can't get an NHS dentist. That's one in four of us, queuing at dawn or yanking our own molars with pliers because "the system's broken." Kids in pain, grannies on painkillers, and the BDA screaming "dental deserts" from Cornwall to Cumbria.
Meanwhile, the Treasury's like, "Tighten your belts – no cash for fillings."
But hold up. What if we told you the real grift? Since 2020, we've funneled £1.4 billion straight to management consultants – the PowerPoint wizards in £3k suits – to "fix" the NHS. Spoiler: They didn't. They just billed us to say, "Yeah, we're broke. Try flossing harder."
£1.4 Billion: Where Did the Money Go?
Let's break it down, year by filthy year. This ain't guesswork – it's straight from FOI requests, Tussell data, and the BMJ's forensic accounting.
| Year | What They Spent (NHS England + ICBs + DHSC Bits) | What They "Delivered" |
|---|---|---|
| 2019-20 | £35m (pre-chaos baseline) | "Efficiency plans" that aged like milk. |
| 2020-21 | £150m (Covid panic mode) | Test & Trace decks blaming nurses for spreadsheets. |
| 2021-22 | £250m (peak pandemic grift) | "Digital transformation" – aka, apps that crashed harder than your gran's laptop. |
| 2022-23 | £300m | Waiting list "strategies" while queues hit the moon. |
| 2023-24 | £400m | "Recovery plans" that recovered jack shit – access DROPPED 3%. |
| 2024-25 (so far) | £265m (and counting) | "Golden hellos" for dentists that lured... 20% of targets? LOL. |
Total: £1.4 billion. Enough to hire 31,000 nurses for a year, or fund 700,000 extra dental slots annually without the begging bowls.
Instead? Consultants from Deloitte, KPMG, PA Consulting – the unholy trinity – pocketing £570m just last year from DHSC and arms.
Consultant Invoices: The Price of "Advice"
Exhibit A: The invoices. We didn't "have" them metaphorically – we dug 'em up.
- PA Consulting? £59m from NHS England alone since 2020, including £2,500 a day for "vaccine rollout advice" that boiled down to "Hire more us."
- KPMG? Up to £2,350 daily for "digital upgrades" – their deck? Slide 1: "Buy more servers." Slide 47: "Invoice attached."
- Deloitte? £3,000 a pop for "efficiency audits," but their big idea for dentistry? "Have you tried... fewer patients?"
One real gem from a 2023 FOI: Boston Consulting Group billed £6,600 daily for Test & Trace "optimisation." Result? A system so shit it couldn't trace its own arse. Now they're pivoting to dentistry "recovery" – because why not charge £11k (that's 1.7 days at BCG rates) for a PowerPoint saying, "The budget's too small, mate. Pass the crisps."
Why Dentistry is the Canary in the Coalmine
Why dentistry? Because it's the canary in the coalmine. Fees haven't risen since 2010 in real terms – practices lose £7.69 per checkup, £42.60 on dentures. Dentists are bolting to private work, leaving "deserts" where the poorest get DIY root canals with YouTube tutorials.
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The "recovery plan"? A £88m flop that's worsened access. Mobile vans? Scrapped. Golden hellos? Barely 50 dentists signed up.
Labour's "Plan for Change" talks toothbrushing for tots (cute, but 2025 called – it wants actual drills). All while consultants whisper, "Reform the contract... after we bill for the whispering."
Systemic Failure: A Feature, Not a Bug
This isn't incompetence. It's a feature. The 2006 contract caps funding, ignores demand, and turns dentists into subsidised volunteers. We've spent billions on suits to "advise" cuts, not cures. Result? 13 million locked out, health inequalities exploding, and a two-tier system where Mayfair gets veneers and Manchester gets pliers.
Unite nailed it: That £140m (2019-23 slice) could've bankrolled 1,037 senior nurses yearly. Or, y'know, teeth.
Time to Rebuild: Beyond Consultant Addiction
The truth? We're not "too poor." We're too consultant-addicted. Every quid to McKinsey is a quid not drilling a kid's cavity. Time to fire the lot – build in-house brains, rewrite the contract for prevention, not punishment, and fund it like we mean it. £1.4bn says we can.
Wes Streeting, Rachel Reeves: Your move. Or we'll keep exposing the receipts.
Screenshot if you've ever waited 6 months for a checkup. Quote-tweet with your DIY horror story. RT if you're done funding slide decks over smiles.
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