Care ratings are out of sight, but far from out of mind

A new report shows the Care Quality Commission (CQC) is failing to keep pace with assessing the quality of social care services in England.

Published today, the third annual report from the Homecare Association shows the situation has not stablished and is getting worse. 

Using CQC data from 5 May 2026, the report found 83.5% of community social care services have either never been inspected or have a rating more than four years old. This is up from 60% in 2024 and 70% in 2025. What’s more, only 16.5% of services now have a rating.

The report said new providers were being checked more carefully and the registration backlog had been cleared. However, it noted this had not improved checks on existing services, with more than 14,000 still without up-to-date ratings. 

Dr Jane Townson OBE, chief executive of the Dr Jane Townson OBE, said: ‘The CQC 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,’ she continued. ‘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.’

With this in mind, the report makes a series of recommendations about how to improve assessment rates. Some of them include faster first inspections for new providers, regular three-year review cycles and extra funding to reduce the backlog of community care assessments.

Dr Townson added: ‘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.’

The research can be read in full here. 

Image: Shutterstock

In related news:

‘There is no justice for women’: a story of domestic abuse and systemic failure

Skills for Care launches Training Hub for adult social care providers