Care Quality Commission (Fees) (Reviews and Performance Assessments) Regulations 2016

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Tuesday 10th May 2016 Grand Committee

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, it strikes me that this situation is rather like sending out the lifeboat to a swimmer in trouble in the sea and, instead of pulling him on board, pushing him further under the waves.

The issue raises a number of questions in my mind. First, is it right that providers should be expected to pay fully for the regulator, resulting in a dramatic increase of 75% in a single year and, I have been told, of 176% over the very short period of two years? If the Government believe that the CQC inspection is the “single definition of success”, they should be expected to pay for some of that quality assurance on behalf of the taxpayer, at least in the short term, in order to achieve the sustainability that we need not just for the CQC but for individual providers.

Over what time period should this new demand on the finances of providers be implemented? How much notice is being given? There were two days for implementation. That does not strike me as sensible, because it allows absolutely no time for proper budget planning.

The other question is whether providers can afford it. In particular, small GP practices in rural areas, I have been told, will be paying 1.75% of their turnover for the CQC. No wonder GPs are charging care homes for attending their residents, even though they already receive a per capita payment for them. What about the care homes, many of which are unprofitable even now? Let us face it: they are businesses—60% of patients are in private care—and we are heading for mass closure, which will be a disaster for all the old and vulnerable who need care.

As the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said, what else will have to be cut from the front line in order for providers to pay for this at a time of unprecedented financial pressure? It will cost £28.7 million over four years, which has to come from a sector which already has a projected deficit of £2.8 billion. It seems that the Government are simply moving around the deficit deck-chairs on the “Titanic”. This is being done while the demand for efficiencies on the part of the CQC are marginal. It therefore follows that we should ask whether the regulator is giving good value for money and whether it is moving fast enough.

I wonder why the Government have chosen to ignore the overwhelming view of providers in the consultation, as the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, mentioned—the so-called consultation, perhaps I should say—given that the consultation on the proposed action was done before the CQC had completed and published its five-year strategy. As the strategy is expected to include significant changes to the inspection model, and therefore the costs, surely it should have been done the other way round.

Has any consideration been given to the idea of a risk-based approach to regulation, such as the one used by Ofsted, where schools that are consistently showing excellent results have a more light-touch inspection regime? Obviously, there would have to be safeguards and triggers for snap inspections, but it seems to work reasonably well in education so why not in health? It saves a lot of time and money.

There are a lot of questions there for the Minister.

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[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health (Lord Prior of Brampton) (Con)]

My Lords, I first acknowledge the fact that any increase in fees, at a time when providers of adult social care, the NHS and elsewhere are going through a very tough time, is clearly very unwelcome. So perhaps it was not surprising, in a sense, that in the consultation when given the choice of spreading the increase over four years or two years, everyone voted for four years rather than two. I think everyone knows that, over time, it was the intention of the previous Government, as well as this one, to have full cost recovery. In the end, that must be right, but it is a question of how long it takes to get from where we are to where we need to be.

Most people will understand why the scope of the CQC’s work has developed over the past three or four years. The origins of the new CQC lay in what happened in Mid Staffordshire, Morecambe Bay and Winterbourne View, and a feeling that those tragedies could not be allowed to happen again. A much more comprehensive, expert-led inspection regime was the right way to try to unearth those awful things.

I totally understand what has been said by my noble friend Lord Lindsay and the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, about moving towards a more risk-based form of inspection. In the CQC’s strategy, which will be announced in a week or so, I hope there will be some reference to it having a more risk-based inspection regime. Of course, that has to be based, as my noble friend Lord Lindsay mentioned, on good intelligence. Over the past three years, the CQC has been able to collect intelligence, particularly on NHS trusts, where there are much better data—we are also using soft data as well as hard data—and that does enable one to put in place a more risk-based system of inspection. It has already said that it will re-inspect institutions that have a “Good” or “Outstanding” rating after a longer period of time than the ones with “Requires improvement” or “Inadequate”. But we will see when it produces its strategy next week exactly what it is planning to do.

On the comments of my noble friend Lord Lindsay, we did have some discussions when I was at the CQC, but I have to accept that they did not get very far. However, I would encourage him to meet the new chairman of the CQC, Peter Wyman, as well as David Behan, whom he already knows, to see whether or not there is any way that UKAS accreditation can help not just in adult social care but in aspects of clinical care as well.

On the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, about the consultation, the consultation period did go from 21 December 2015 to 1 February 2016. There was a reasonable period of consultation, but I accept that the implementation of the increase was much quicker. I also know that, although it did not sound very much in the context of the whole, for individual trusts this was just another cost increase that they had to bear. It is worth noting that the total cost of the CQC as a proportion of the whole that is expected for adult social care and the NHS is around 0.19%—very similar to the cost of Ofsted in education. So it is not as though it is expensive; it is just that the level of cost recovery has been ordained to be over a shorter time.

It is also worth noting that, for domiciliary care, the period of time is over four years and not two years. For GPs, where it was felt that the cost increase was the straw that might break the camel’s back, the baseline funding has been increased to allow for the extra increase.

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, am I right in thinking that the help for GPs will be over just one year?

[Lord Prior of Brampton]

I believe that it has gone into the baseline funding of the GP contract, but if I am wrong about that I shall write to the noble Baroness.

More generally, the CQC’s scope and the way that it does its inspections is just much broader than it used to be. They are done in more depth and detail. This statutory instrument was introduced to Parliament so that it would reflect what the CQC is now doing and recognise its enlarged scope. The regulations do not extend the remit of the CQC’s activity or the scope of reviews or performance assessments to additional providers or services; neither does it change the fees actually charged.

The CQC, like every other aspect of the NHS, is going to have to save a considerable amount of money over the next five years, which the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, referred to in his speech. This means that the kind of inspections which we have seen in some NHS trusts, where a large number of very expensive people descend upon a trust, will have to be scaled back to some extent. As the noble Baroness intimated, I think that we will see a more risk-based inspection model—a bit more like the Ofsted model. I suspect that we will see more unannounced inspections as well, because a large part of the cost of the CQC is not just its direct cost but the indirect costs on the trusts preparing for the inspections. Sometimes the degree of preparation undermines the validity and insightfulness of the actual inspection.

I take on board entirely the strictures of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. This is another expense when times are extremely hard, but it reflects the fact that the scope of the CQC is now broader than it was three years ago, and the need to have full cost recovery over a fairly limited time.