Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to help support improvement in domiciliary care providers that have been issued with warning notices by the Care Quality Commission.

To ensure adult social care providers, including domiciliary care services, meet fundamental standards of quality and safety, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) monitors, inspects, and regulates these services. All inspection reports on individual providers are made publicly available.

The CQC is continuing to make changes to the way it works and has set out four immediate actions and five foundational improvements, which are being implemented to help ensure that it is carrying out its regulatory work with the sufficient depth and frequency to be assured that the requirements of any warning notices are met as close to the required compliance date as possible. These priorities will also enable the CQC to address delays in the reporting on the quality and safety of care in all care services, including domiciliary care services, which will increase transparency for both providers and the public who use these services.

The CQC also signposts providers to the support that is available to help them improve, where shortfalls and breaches of regulation have been found. For example, Skills for Care have produced a Guide to Improvement to support providers that need to improve their rating.