Sir, readers of Dental Update will have noted that my views, expressed in an editorial three months ago,1 and more recently2 were similar to those presented by your good self in your recent editorial, Data day (BDJ 2006; 200: 301), which succinctly and emotionally stated that 'a powerful source of data is to be smothered'. It beggars belief that the collection of data for administrative and research purposes at the Dental Practice Board has been stopped, to be replaced by the untested Units of Dental Activity, which measure little. No longer will practitioners have the ability to measure the longevity of their restorations, surely a basic tenet of clinical governance. No longer will researchers be able to demonstrate, as they have done recently3 that the public in England and Wales has been most cost-effectively served by their NHS dentists. Indeed, NHS dentistry has been the envy of much of the developed world.

My Masters students presented SWOT analyses of their practices early in December 2005. Having listened to their anxieties about the changes to NHS dentistry, I was moved to write to the Prime Minister. In the letter I expressed my serious disquiet that the new arrangements would not please patients, who will often have to pay more and will not have improved access (who in their right mind will take on a patient requiring extensive restorative treatment under the new arrangements?), that they would not please dentists who will still be on a treadmill (meaningless UDAs) unless they have inflated their gross in the historical period. Moreover, the new system does not measure oral health, which surely it should. The reply took three months, an indication, surely, of a serious lack of interest in the new arrangements from Downing Street, perhaps hinting that the new arrangements are a back door means of pushing dentists into the private sector. A rationalised fee per item to allow new attendees to achieve oral health prior to entering into a capitation system would have solved many of the problems of GDS and nGDS, or payments linked to improvements in oral health, which is now readily measurable by means of a tried and tested Index.4 While there was no question that the 400+ fees in the GDS required rationalising, the abandonment of meaningful data collection seems like folly.