BRITAIN'S state dental service is decaying before our eyes. NHS dentists are becoming rarer than hen's teeth and the system that provides them is riddled with cavities.

The best way to demonstrate the scale of the mess is to compare dentists with doctors.

Imagine your GP suddenly announced you would be denied further treatment unless you paid, say, £20 a month into a private insurance scheme. Protests that you have already paid via your taxes fall on deaf ears.

So you contact the health authorities to find your nearest NHS GP surgeries and are told they are in Harrogate, Hull and Teesside.

The Selby and York Primary Care Trust comments helpfully that "it is not uncommon for patients to register with a practice that may be some distance from where they live".

If such a scenario came about there would be outrage. Yet this is precisely what thousands of North Yorkshire dental patients face today.

The problem was starkly illustrated by the huge queue outside a Scarborough dental surgery when it took on a new NHS practitioner.

Now the same thing could happen in York. Two more York practices are turning private, compelling thousands of patients to pay up or opt out.

It is a crisis, a disgrace, a scandal. Yet our dental service has been so poorly administered for so long, patients feel powerless to do anything about it.

The Government should have undertaken a radical overhaul of dentistry to ensure more private practitioners undertook NHS work. Instead they have abdicated responsibility on to local health trusts.

This appears to be speeding up dentists' rush towards the private sector.

No wonder patients across the country are sick to the back teeth of Britain's dental deficit.

Updated: 10:21 Tuesday, May 11, 2004