Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many times his officials have met with Care Quality Commission's senior leadership team to discuss the organisation’s business case on pay awards for 2022-23.

The Care Quality Commission’s (CQC) pay business cases were created with external assistance from a management consultancy who were engaged between July 2021 and October 2022. The total cost was £138,824, which can be broken down as a) 2021/22: £59,407 and b) 2022/23: £79,417. There was no such engagement in 2020/21.

As of 10 March 2023, 6% of full-time equivalent posts were vacant.

CQC has underspent its staffing budgets, which is broken down by year in the table below:

CQC have made the following numbers of redundancies, broken down by year in the table below:

The figure for redundancies in 2022/23 is higher due to the progression of CQC’s ongoing transformation programme, which led to structural changes within the organisation.

CQC are subject to the annual Civil Service pay remit guidance. As sponsor Department, the Department for Health and Social Care is responsible for approval of CQC’s annual pay award. As part of this process, various departmental teams and officials feed into the approvals process, including the Department’s Sponsorship, Human Resources and Finance teams. As part of this, departmental officials across these teams met with CQC to discuss their case at several points throughout the process. For 2022/23, CQC submitted a pay flexibility business case to the Department, which would have required further approvals from the Cabinet Office and HM Treasury. This was ultimately withdrawn and CQC submitted a business case in line with the 2022/23 Civil Service pay remit guidance for approval.