April brings rise in charges care providers must pay to the CQC

Topics covered: Ridouts professional advice

Fees that care home and domiciliary care providers must pay to CQC rose in April.

On 1 April care home providers with 26-30 residents saw their registration charges rise by £163 from £4,212 to £4,375.  Single-location community social care providers also saw a £823 rise in their fees to £2,192 a year.

CQC is funded by fees from care providers and by grant-in-aid from the Department of Health.  It is also  required by the Government to move towards Full Chargeable Cost Recovery (FCCR) for all the health and adult social care providers in England that it regulates.

CQC’s fees have been increasing over the last few years and grant-in-aid reducing. The budget for the regulator has decreased, in 2015/16 the budget was £29m but in 2019/20 the budget will be £217m, a reduction of £32m.

Martin Green, the chief executive of Care England, has said: –

“The increase in CQC fees come at a particularly difficult time for the care sector, which is suffering from years of under funding and is, in the words of the CQC themselves, at a tipping point.

“As the burden of regulatory costs shifts from the government to the care provider, CQC must understand that this places them in a customer supplier relationship with the care sector, and as customers, we will expect to see some very clear service standards.

“We want to see clarity about response times to correspondence, amending factual inaccuracies in reports and on the CQC website etc.

“The CQC is accountable to the public and to the government for its judgement on the quality of care services, and this function has not changed.

“However, it is now also accountable to its customers, the health and social care sector, for its administrative processes and the services that it provides”.

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