The Care Quality Commission (CQC) continues to struggle with its core regulatory responsibilities in community social care, which includes homecare and support for older and disabled people, and people with learning disabilities, autism or mental health needs. Here, we compare performance against our August 2024 and September 2025 analyses. This report examines CQC data downloaded on 5 May 2026 and compares it with our previous findings to assess whether the regulator has made progress in addressing the backlogs and operational challenges we identified.
The report finds that:
- Assessment performance has deteriorated further.
- The number of currently rated services has collapsed.
- The CQC continues to prioritise residential care over community care.
- Annual community assessment activity remains too low, despite recent improvement.
- The deterioration is outpacing our own projections.
- Recently assessed services show rising concern.
In summary, we make the following recommendations:
- Deploy surge capacity to clear the community backlog.
- Ring-fence and rebalance assessment effort towards community social care in proportion to its share of the market.
- Introduce a risk-based two-tier system so that never-assessed services receive a timely first assessment.
- Publish monthly, sector-specific data on assessment completions and backlog reduction.
- Commission an independent assessment of the resources required to maintain a three-year cycle across the expanded community market.
- Protect inspection throughput during the transition to the new frameworks.
You can read the report in full here.
