Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department plans to take to (a) tackle, (b) prevent and (c) monitor poor quality care in council-commissioned care homes.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator for health and social care in England. The CQC monitors, inspects, and regulates adult social care services, including council-commissioned care homes, to make sure they meet fundamental standards of quality and safety. Inspection reports on individual providers are made publicly available.

Where concerns on quality or safety are identified, the CQC uses a range of regulatory and enforcement powers to take action to ensure the safety of the people drawing on care and support.

This could include using requirement notices to highlight areas that need improvement, or placing adult social care providers into special measures to closely supervise the quality of their care. In cases of significant concern, the CQC can take action that could lead to the removal of a provider’s registration or, in the most serious cases, take criminal action.

The CQC also assesses local authorities’ delivery of their duties under Part 1 of the Care Act 2014. This includes the local authority’s duty to work closely with local providers to ensure high quality services that put the wellbeing of the people who draw on care at the centre of decisions. Local authorities should also keep contracts under review to confirm that care requirements are being met, and to seek to continuously improve the quality, effectiveness, and efficiency of services.

I recently met with Sir Julian Hartley on 14 March 2025, where we discussed the CQC’s recent challenges and how we will continue working closely together on key priorities.