Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, when the Care Quality Commission will resume routine inspections; and how many care homes have not had an inspection for two years or more.

At the start of the pandemic, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) paused routine inspections and adopted a risk-based approach utilising a range of information to target inspections where concerns are identified, such as localised outbreak data, whistleblowing, and data shared through system partners. Over the last six months, the CQC has carried out 4,300 inspections in adult social care.

The CQC currently regulates 15,403 nursing and care homes. 6,056 of these have not had a cross-threshold inspection for two years or more. However, the CQC routinely interacts with care homes in a variety of ways outside of inspections, such as through regular engagement with registered managers, and through its Emergency Support Framework (ESF), developed during the pandemic to allow it to have structured, supportive, monitoring calls with providers. Additionally, since 1 April 2020, 17,273 individual adult social care locations have received an ESF call. The CQC’s future strategy will build on this experience and continue to involve more targeted and dynamic inspection visits.