Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps the Government is taking to improve the regulation and oversight of the performance of care homes; and if he will make a statement.

The Care Act 2014 placed duties on local authorities to shape their local markets to ensure all adult social care service users have a choice of high quality services. The Department is working with the Care Quality Commission and partners across the adult social care sector to implement Quality Matters – a shared commitment to take action to achieve high quality, person-centred adult social care.

The Care Quality Commission has provided the following response:

The Care Quality Commission introduced an updated inspection methodology from 1 November for adult social care services, including care homes. The new methodology took into account learning from the inspection and rating of these services from October 2014 onwards as well as undertaking a public consultation in 2017.

Changes introduced include more proportionate and targeted inspections; a stronger regulatory focus on services rated as requires improvement, using enforcement powers to require providers to take action when they need to improve; improvements in identifying, monitoring and responding to risks; developing and sharing information from providers, collected online, as a single shared view of quality; and on reporting, making reports clearer and more informative, including reference to serious incidents.