Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what proportion of safeguarding concerns responded to by the Care Quality Commission were responded to within the target time frame in each year since 2010-11.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator of health and adult social care providers in England and has a key responsibility in the overall assurance of safety and quality of health and adult social care services.

The CQC has provided the following information:

For the period January 2013 to March 2015 the CQC had target response times for safeguarding information. There were two elements of the response time: alerts and concerns.

A CQC safeguarding alert is where CQC is the first agency receiving the safeguarding information and/or there is a need for CQC to take immediate action. The local authority will be informed within 24 hours.

A CQC safeguarding concern is other safeguarding information, where the CQC is not the first agency to receive the information. The CQC will risk assess the information, to determine whether regulatory action is needed. The information received will be assessed against its regulatory standards within 48 hours.

The attached table shows the recorded performance against these timeframes since 1 January 2013.

From April 2015, CQC will be measuring performance of the time taken to complete a range of different regulatory actions in response to safeguarding information. This will provide better information that CQC is taking appropriate action in response to information of concern.