Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department plans to take steps to ensure that private care providers are Regularly (a) inspected and (b) rated by the Care Quality Commission.

The Department has taken steps to ensure that all providers registered with the Care Quality Commission (CQC), including private care providers are regularly assessed and rated by the CQC.

The interim findings and recommendations made by Dr Penny Dash as part of her review include a clear need for the CQC to increase operational activity. Work is underway to increase the number of inspections the CQC carries out, this includes inspections of private care providers, so the public have an up-to-date understanding of quality and providers are able to demonstrate improvement.

The CQC is working with Professor Sir Mike Richards and Professor Vic Rayner, the Chair of the Care Provider Alliance, to review longer-term improvements to their single assessment framework and how they use it. Other changes to the single assessment framework, such as how CQC score quality statements will allow the CQC to assess and inspect more services while ensuring their ratings are robust. This will also allow the CQC to produce better reports that are clearer about their judgements and ratings.

The CQC reports to the Department regularly on their improvement work, and wider responses to the interim Dash review.