Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact on the quality and experience of inspectors of the decision by the Care Quality Commission to outsource services to Remploy.

Experts by Experience provide an important role in the Care Quality Commission’s (CQC) inspections programme, working alongside the CQC’s professional inspectors. Experts by Experience provide valuable insights and judgements, talking to people who use the service and observing the environment and the quality of care hospitals and care homes provide.

In December 2015, the CQC announced the successful winners of the new contracts to provide Experts by Experience, Choice Support and Remploy Ltd. The Experts by Experience service has been an outsourced service since its inception. The CQC’s professional inspectors are not outsourced and are unaffected by these contracts.

The delivery of these services from 1 February 2016 by Remploy is as a result of a compliant procurement of these services. The procurement process included a rigorous evaluation of each of the tendering organisations response to delivering the service requirements against quality standards for service delivery.

The CQC’s decision to award these new contracts focussed on expanding the numbers of Experts by Experience involved in the CQC’s inspections, ensuring that the high quality contribution Experts by Experience have provided to date is maintained and delivering value for money.

The CQC is the independent regulator for health and adult social care in England. It is responsible for its own staffing requirements, including any decisions on contracts around the supplying of Experts by Experience for its inspections of providers. In line with Cabinet Office approvals processes, the Department:

- gave approval for the CQC to invite tenders for the Experts by Experience programme; and

- reviewed and approved the CQC’s business case, to enable the CQC to proceed with finalising new contracts for Experts by Experience.