Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their current assessment of the level of co-ordination between the Care Quality Commission and commissioners for places in care homes.

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

CQC has outlined its commitment to working with local authorities to minimise duplication, including in adult social care, in its provider handbooks which were published on 9 October 2014. This includes CQC inspection managers having regular meetings with their assigned local authorities, attending local safeguarding meetings where relevant and also local safeguarding boards to provide an update on CQC’s work annually. In addition, providers are asked to complete a CQC Provider Information Return and an evaluation form before an inspection. 79% of residential care providers responding said they had not recently been asked to provide similar information for any other purposes.

CQC has organised its adult social care directorate to reflect local authority boundaries which will allow the alignment of CQC staff with local authorities for commissioning and information sharing and safeguarding.

CQC’s Adult Social Care inspection staff also have relationships with local clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) which enables the CCGs to update CQC on the outcomes of their contract monitoring visits as well as CQC providing the CCG with information and outcomes of recent inspections in the area.

CQC anticipates that as its new methodology beds down and more services are rated, local authorities will have greater confidence in the regulatory system for adult social care and therefore reduce their activity for those services with ‘good’ and ‘outstanding’ ratings. Local authorities will always have their own contract monitoring duties to fulfil but one of the benefits of the new regulatory approach should be a minimisation of unnecessary duplication of activities. There is work underway between CQC and the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services to develop an information sharing portal.