Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, in how many instances the Care Quality Commission has asked service providers to instigate fit and proper persons requirement (FPPR) investigations for each year since the FPPR came into force; and how many of those FPPR investigations resulted in a director being discharged from duty.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England.

The CQC has provided the following information:

The following actions have been taken in relation to Regulation 5 Fit and Proper Persons Requirement:

- CQC management reviews enable the CQC to reach a decision about the next course of action to take in response to a trigger for review, for example when we identify concerns around non-compliance with the regulations during an inspection, at the point of registration, or when we receive a safeguarding alert or concern. As at 8 February 2017 there have been 38 Adult Social Care (ASC), 14 Hospital, 5 Primary Medical Services and 37 Registration management reviews held regarding regulation 5.

There have been 28 enforcement actions under this regulation:

- 21 have been triggered by an enquiry, 16 of which were during the registration process.

- Seven were triggered by an inspection, four at ASC locations and three at Hospital locations.

- In seven cases registration was refused. In five cases registration was cancelled and in a further eight cases the providers were registered with agreed actions. The remainder included recommended fixed penalty notices, urgent and non-urgent imposition of conditions and warning notices.