Embargoed until 00:01 Wednesday 10 June 2026
The Homecare Association reports that 83.5 per cent of community social care locations now have no current quality rating, two years after it first warned that the regulator was falling behind. Welcome reform at the point of registration, and early signs that assessment activity is rising, have not yet been matched by enough progress to close a backlog that is still growing.
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is still not keeping pace with the task of assessing the quality of community social care services in England, according to a new report from the Homecare Association published today. The analysis, the third in an annual series, finds that the position has not stabilised but has continued to worsen, and at an accelerating pace.
Drawing on CQC data downloaded on 5 May 2026, the report finds that 83.5 per cent of community social care locations had either never been assessed or held a rating four or more years old. That figure has risen from 60 per cent in 2024 and 70 per cent in 2025. Only 16.5 per cent of services now hold a current rating, defined as one published within the past three years.
The report records genuine and welcome progress at the point of entry to the market. The CQC has cleared its registration backlog and raised the standards required of new applicants, in line with a recommendation the Homecare Association has made for several years. The concern is that this has not translated into assurance for the more than 14,000 community services already operating, the great majority of which still lack a current rating.
The report also recognises that the CQC is now acting to increase the number of assessments it completes. Under its new Chief Inspector, the regulator has strengthened management oversight of inspectors, rebalanced its prioritisation to give weight to homecare, and begun to speed up the inspection process. This is starting to show in the figures: community assessments rose to almost 96 per month in the four months to April 2026, compared with an average of 78 per month across the year. The Homecare Association calls this welcome and genuine progress, but cautions that it remains well short of the roughly 406 assessments per month needed simply to keep ratings current.
Key findings
- Performance has deteriorated further. As of 5 May 2026, 83.5 per cent of community social care locations had no current rating: 36.9 per cent had never been assessed and a further 46.6 per cent held a rating four to ten years old.
- The stock of current ratings has collapsed. The number of community locations holding an up-to-date rating has more than halved in two years, falling from 5,118 in 2024 to 4,204 in 2025 and 2,413 in 2026, a reduction of 53 per cent.
- Residential care is still prioritised over community care. In the year to 5 May 2026 the CQC published 2,076 residential ratings but only 934 community ratings, 2.2 times as many, even though the two sub-sectors are now almost identical in size.
- The community assessment rate fell over the year but is now rising. Community locations were rated at an average of about 78 per month across the year, down from 81 the previous year, but the rate rose to almost 96 per month in the four months to April 2026. Around 406 per month would be needed simply to maintain a three-year cycle.
- The decline is outpacing the Association’s own projections. A level of current ratings not expected until around 2030 has effectively been reached in 2026, roughly four years early.
- Recently assessed services show rising concern. Among community ratings published in the past year, 24 per cent were rated requires improvement or inadequate, double the 12 per cent across all ratings since 2016. The proportion rated inadequate rose from 0.5 per cent to 3.6 per cent. These recently assessed services are not a representative sample, since the CQC prioritises higher-risk cases, but the trend points to undetected problems in the much larger unassessed population.
- Registration reform is real progress. Of 3,053 new homecare applications received in the six months to April 2026, 67 per cent were rejected at the initial completeness check and 83 per cent of those reaching assessment were refused. Only around 174, fewer than one in seventeen, were granted.
Comment
Dr Jane Townson OBE, Chief Executive of the Homecare Association and author of the report, said:
“The Care Quality Commission has made real and welcome progress at the front door of regulation. The trouble is that the house behind it remains largely unseen. More than four in five community care services now have no current quality rating. The system that is meant to tell people whether care in their own home is safe and good is no longer doing that for most of the market.”
“This is not an abstract problem. Our members are being suspended from council tenders and losing the people they support, not because their care is necessarily poor, but because they have never been assessed. At the same time, poor or unsafe care delivered behind someone’s front door, where it is least visible, can continue undetected for years.”
“The answer is time-limited, ring-fenced government funding to clear the backlog, and a firm guarantee that every new provider is assessed within twelve months. It would be unreasonable to raise providers’ fees for a service many are not receiving in good time. The CQC has shown it can fix the front door, and it has begun to lift assessment numbers. It now needs the resources and the sustained focus to go much further and assess the existing market at scale.”
What the report calls for
The report sets out nine recommendations. In summary, it calls on the CQC and government to:
- Guarantee a first assessment of every newly registered provider within twelve months, assess every provider at least once every three years, and not award a quality rating at registration unless it is clearly labelled as a provisional registration assessment;
- Provide time-limited, ring-fenced government funding for surge capacity to clear the community backlog, rather than increasing provider fees;
- Rebalance assessment effort towards community social care, in proportion to its share of the market;
- Introduce a risk-based, two-tier assessment system so that never-assessed services are reached first;
- Publish monthly, sector-specific data on assessment completions and backlog reduction; and
- Commission an independent review of the resources required to maintain a three-year assessment cycle across the expanded community market.
You can read the report here: Unseen & Unrated: The widening CQC assurance gap in community social care, two years on.
ENDS
Notes to Editor
- The Homecare Association is the professional association for homecare providers, representing more than 2,100 members across the United Kingdom and supporting the delivery of high-quality care in people’s own homes.
- The report, Unseen and unrated: the widening CQC assurance gap in community social care, two years on, is published by the Homecare Association and written by Dr Jane Townson OBE. It analyses CQC published care directory data downloaded on 5 May 2026, with dormant and not-applicable locations excluded, and compares the position with the Association’s August 2024 and September 2025 reports.
- “Community social care” includes homecare and support for older and disabled people, and people with learning disabilities, autism or mental health needs. A “current rating” is one published within the past three years. “No recent rating” means a service has never been assessed or its most recent published rating is four or more years old.
- The community social care market has grown by around 60 per cent since 2017/18, from about 9,100 to 14,597 locations, while residential provision has been broadly flat to gently declining, from about 16,200 to 14,842. The two sub-sectors are now of essentially equal size.
- The findings follow the independent reviews of the CQC led by Dr Penny Dash and Professor Sir Mike Richards in 2024. The CQC is replacing its Single Assessment Framework with four sector-specific frameworks, and on 26 May 2026 published a clearer basis for prioritising assessments that now includes aged ratings and services left unassessed for more than a year after registration.
- The registration figures and the CQC’s plans for assessment were set out by the regulator at the Homecare Association Annual Conference on 20 May 2026.
- The figure of almost 96 community social care assessments per month covers inspection reports published between January and April 2026; the average of 78 per month covers the 12 months to 5 May 2026 (Homecare Association analysis of CQC data). The CQC’s recent actions to increase assessment activity were set out by its Chief Inspector of Adult Social Care, Chris Badger, at the Homecare Association board meeting on 18 March 2026.
- The Homecare Association recommends time-limited government funding for surge capacity to enable the CQC to reduce the backlog. Increasing providers’ fees would be unreasonable because providers are already paying regulatory fees while many are not receiving timely assessment.
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