IT is a measure of East Lancashire's dental health crisis that Burnley's MP, Peter Pike, normally far from a back-bench rebel, is driven to lay into the government and demand that more is done to tackle the region's severe shortage of NHS dentists.

And Mr Pike provided another telling measure of the problem's extent when he revealed that 20 per cent of calls made in Lancashire to the NHS Direct helpline were about access to NHS dentistry.

Behind that figure lies an awful lot of pain and distress and a great deal of neglect of dental health because tens of thousands of people in East Lancashire lack access to NHS treatment and cannot afford private care.

It is a situation that has driven health chiefs to controversially revive calls for the fluoridation of drinking water while the government is, in effect, offloading the problem on to local NHS primary care trusts instead of taking the kind of direct action that Mr Pike demands.

For while it intends to give the trusts the £1.2billion it currently holds itself for NHS dentistry and while this will in time enable the trusts to employ NHS dentists directly and pay private practices to offer NHS treatment, it can hardly be said that the government is doing much extra or urgently to deal with the crisis.

Mr Pike is right to complain and to keep it up. And he deserves to be joined by all our MPs until real action results.