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Thank you, convener. As recorded in the register of members’ interests, I am a director of a small business consultancy, which, from time to time, I do a little bit of work for outside parliamentary time.

Good morning. A couple of things have popped out from Maggie Chapman and Colin Smyth’s discussions with the witnesses. The process that leads to debt recovery tends to be rather protracted and results in what you might call an increasing level of urgency in the interaction between creditor and debtor, which, in and of itself, is stressful—perhaps for both parties but certainly for the person in debt.

There is the idea of a gatekeeper and of how we assess those who are in debt. Should the bill include provisions on how debtors might receive financial advice and at what stage they might receive that? Should we be better at ensuring that debtors understand what advice is available to them? I put that to Barry Mochan.

I will go back to something that you said, Mr Ferris, about encouraging people from overseas to come and work here. You said that we had brought in 50 Polish dentists. I have a moral issue with that in that we are sucking talent from everywhere else and, while we are doing that, we are allowing our own talent to leave or to work privately and not in NHS dentistry. Do you see what I am getting at? Should we not focus more on how we retain our own talent within NHS dentistry?

Minister, it does not matter how many dentists are in training. If they do not want to go into NHS dentistry, it will make no difference whatsoever. Over and above that, we have heard that a lot of dentists’ staff are moving to private practice, purely for financial reasons because private practice can pay more.

We have to understand what the problem is before we can fix it. My concern is that we are hearing one side of the argument, and then what we hear from you differs so much from that that I am not sure what the reality is, although I am not sure what my colleagues think.

We have heard that the NHS is under huge pressure across the board, and dentistry seems to be at the worst end of that. It is to the point where someone said that it is in danger of falling over. We have to accept what the reality is. You talk about the idea that we need more dentists, but what we need is more NHS dentists. How do we get more NHS dentists to practice?

I have a final question. We have heard not only that there can be a long delay in getting payment for treatments that have been done but that some treatments on the NHS actually cost the dentist money to deliver. Are you looking at that issue?

Good morning, minister. I have been listening with interest to what has been said and reflecting on the view of dentistry that has been portrayed, which is markedly different from the evidence that we have heard before. As a committee, we have to assess the evidence that is before us. As my colleague Jackie Baillie said, dentists have repeatedly talked about wanting to look at prevention, which you will know is a passion of mine. They have also said that there is no immediate strategy or capacity to clear the backlog or take immediate action on poor oral health. In fact, last week, we heard from dentists that, under the current system, the backlog will never be cleared. The concern for me is the huge gulf between the evidence that we are hearing today and the evidence that we have heard over the past couple of weeks.

I will mention a couple of things. One is that, because of the big gaps between dental appointments, the treatment that dentists are having to provide is much more complex, which is an indication of a problem. The other is that dentists get paid when treatment is finished, which is a problem when it takes longer to complete treatment. For example, if there is an initial appointment, a filling that is done after three months and another filling that is done after another three months, the dentist is not paid for six months. Dentists say that the system cannot continue.

If we are going to fix this, which I think that we all want to do, we have to understand the reality. The evidence that the committee has heard has painted an NHS dentistry system that, as John Mason said, students have said that they do not want to work in. We know that current NHS dentists are drifting towards the private sector. Help us here, minister. How do we close the gulf between what you are saying and the evidence that we have heard?

They are not in the EU, though.

Good morning, gentlemen. You have answered quite a lot of the questions that I was going to ask. What is really worrying, especially on the preventative side of things, is the inequality in the service, which we heard about last week, and how that affects Scottish index of multiple deprivation areas 1 and 2, as compared with the more affluent areas. What were your experiences of that during Covid? Why does there seem to be an increasing disparity?

How do we do that?

Is it not high volume, low margin?