Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many early warnings has the Care Quality Commission issued to local authorities on the potential market failure of difficult to replace social care providers; and how many local authorities have received such warnings in each quarter since the market oversight provisions of the Care Act 2014 came into force.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has provided the following response.

The CQC’s application of the Market Oversight legislation is that it will provide a notification to impacted local authorities when it is satisfied that service cessation as a result of business failure is likely. This is commonly referred to as a ‘stage 6’ notification. This criterion has only been satisfied on one occasion, in Q1 of the financial year 2018/19, when the CQC provided the relevant notification to a single impacted local authority in relation to a single care home.