Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many care home providers have been required by the Care Quality Commission to develop Risk Mitigation Plans since April 2015.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator of health and adult social care providers in England.

The CQC has advised:

Section 56 of the Care Act 2014 requires the CQC to notify affected local authorities if a care provider that is subject to the market oversight scheme is likely to have a business failure event which will cause regulated activities to cease. Since April 2015, the CQC has been assessing the financial sustainability of all the providers who are eligible for the scheme. The CQC has not made any notifications to local authorities under Section 56 as no providers have met the criteria set out in the Care Act 2014 of a likely business failure event and likely service cessation.

Following consultation, the CQC published guidance in March 2015 setting out how it would operate the new regulatory regime of market oversight in adult social care. The guidance explains the purpose of both a Risk Assessment Meeting and a Risk Mitigation Plan as steps in the CQC’s process to better understand potential risks to sustainability of providers to allow the CQC to assess if the criteria set out in Section 56 of the Care Act 2014.

The CQC does not provide data on the number of risk assessment meetings held or risk mitigation plans requested as this could be commercially confidential.