CQC Is Changing How It Inspects Care Providers. Here Is What It Means When You Are Choosing Home Care

If you are choosing home care for someone you love, the Care Quality Commission rating is usually the first thing you look at, and quite rightly. So it matters that CQC is in the middle of changing how it inspects and assesses providers like us. Most of the coverage has been written for care companies. This one is written for families, because you are the people who actually have to read the reports and make a decision.

Who is the CQC and why does it matter to me?

The Care Quality Commission is the independent regulator for health and social care in England. Every home care provider must be registered with it, must have a named Registered Manager, and is inspected against national standards. A provider that is not CQC registered cannot legally deliver personal care. If you take one thing from this article, take that: check the registration before you check anything else.

What is CQC changing?

In 2023 CQC introduced a single assessment framework that applied the same set of quality statements to every type of service, from a GP surgery to a care home to a home care agency. It was widely criticised, including by CQC itself in its own reviews, for being slow, confusing and not well suited to the very different realities of those services.

CQC has consulted on a move to sector-specific frameworks, so that adult social care, which covers home care, would have its own framework built around what actually happens in someone’s home rather than what happens on a hospital ward. The draft was published in March 2026 and the consultation closed in June. Under it, the quality statements would be replaced by a shorter set of key lines of enquiry, which are plain questions describing exactly what an inspector will look for.

It is worth being clear about where this has got to, because a lot of the coverage reads as though it has already happened. It has not. CQC is still working through the consultation responses, no final framework or start date has been confirmed, and the numbers being quoted come from the draft and could still change. For now the existing assessment framework, with its quality statements, is what providers are measured against. You can check the current position on CQC’s own assessment page.

What is not changing?

This is the reassuring part. The five key questions that every report is built around stay exactly as they are:

• Safe. Are people protected from harm and abuse?
• Effective. Does the care actually work and improve people’s lives?
• Caring. Are people treated with compassion, dignity and respect?
• Responsive. Is the service organised around people’s needs?
• Well-led. Is the service run properly, with good leadership and a culture of learning?

The four ratings, Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement and Inadequate, also stay the same. So a rating you read today means what it meant last year, and it will mean the same thing under the new framework. What is changing is the method behind the rating, not the rating itself.

How do I check a home care provider on the CQC website?

1. Go to cqc.org.uk and search the provider’s name or postcode.
2. Check the service is registered and that the registration is current. If you cannot find them, ask them for their Provider ID. Ours is 1-12363890094 and you can see our page here.
3. Look at the overall rating, then look at the rating for each of the five questions. A provider can be Good overall with a weaker area underneath, and that detail is what tells you the real story.
4. Read the date of the last inspection. Reports can be several years old. An older report is not automatically a problem, but ask the provider what has changed since.
5. Read the actual report, not just the rating. Inspectors quote what families and staff told them, and those quotes are honestly the most useful thing on the page.

What should I ask a provider directly?

The report tells you what an inspector found on one visit. These questions tell you what it is like day to day.

• Who is the Registered Manager, and can I speak to them? If the answer is no, that tells you something.
• How many different carers will visit my relative in a typical week?
• What happens if a carer is late or does not turn up?
• How is medication recorded, and can I see the records?
• How do you tell me when something changes or goes wrong?
• What training do your carers have for dementia, or for whatever condition matters in your case?

Where does Honorable Care stand on all this?

We welcome it. A framework written for home care rather than borrowed from hospitals is better for families and, frankly, better for good providers, because it asks about the things that actually make care at home safe: consistency of carers, medication, communication with families, and whether the people running the service know what is going on in every home they visit. Those are the things we are already measured on every day by the families we support, and they are the things we would rather be inspected on.

We are a small, family-run provider in Stoke-on-Trent, CQC registered, with Zoe Rafferty as our Registered Manager. We have not yet had our first inspection, so there is no report to read on our CQC page at the moment, and we would rather say that plainly than let anyone assume otherwise. When it happens, the report will be published there for anyone to read. If you want to talk through anything in this article, call us on 01782 528087. We would rather you asked hard questions before choosing us than found out afterwards that you should have.

Updated 20 October 2026: this article originally described the new sector-specific framework as confirmed and due from late 2026. It is still a draft out for consultation, so we have corrected that section.