Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what support his Department has offered to the Care Quality Commission to reduce the backlog of (a) initial inspections and (b) reinspections of healthcare providers.

Departmental officials meet fortnightly with the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to discuss measures CQC have put in place to address among other issues, delays in the production of inspection reports and initial inspection and reinspection.

As part of this process, the CQC provides fortnightly updates to senior Departmental officials on the work it is doing to improve and ensure it has robust systems in place to support the changes it is making to deliver its assessment activity of the providers it regulates. This increased reporting to, and oversight from, the Department also allows the level of risk across the CQC’s delivery to be monitored at a senior level.

Delays to the CQC’s inspection activities are partially due to failures of its IT systems. The CQC has accepted recommendations of the independent review into the CQC’s technology which was published in March 2025 and is available at the following link:

https://www.cqc.org.uk/news/independent-review-cqc-technology-published

The CQC is currently working to review options for alternative methods of inspection report publication while work is carried out to make necessary changes to its IT systems.

The introduction of a ‘hybrid’ approach which launched on 2 December 2024 aims to streamline the existing process by discontinuing scoring at the evidence category level and instead reporting at the quality statement level. This change is intended to improve efficiency for CQC staff. In addition, efforts are underway to address the backlog of ‘stuck’ assessments within the system. As of 24 April 2025, the current number of ‘stuck’ assessments is 52, a reduction of 448.

Work continues to further lower this number and to strengthen the monitoring and management of assessment delays.