Care Homes: Inspections
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to ensure that care homes are inspected regularly.
Answered by Dr Zubir Ahmed
The Department is holding the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to account for its performance and has strengthened oversight following Dr Penny Dash’s review of the CQC’s operational effectiveness, including improvements in timeliness of assessments.
The CQC has pledged to respond rapidly to urgent and extreme risks, prioritising services registered for over a year without assessment or inspection and those with outdated ratings. From January 2026, this refreshed approach will enable the CQC to prioritise settings, including care homes.
In the 2024/25 financial year, the CQC completed 2,292 assessments of adult social care services. From 1 April 2025 to 22 March 2026, the CQC completed 3,546 assessments of adult social care services, an increase of 55%.
The CQC is piloting a number of initiatives to increase the number of assessments they can deliver in adult care per year to ensure care settings are inspected regularly, and these will be rolled out in the first half of the 2026/27 financial year.
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