We're asking care providers and the organisations that represent them to give us their views on the regulatory fees we’ll be charging from 1 April 2016.
All health and adult social care services that carry on activities we regulate must pay us annual fees. What we charge is set out every year in our fees scheme. When these charges change, we carry out a consultation to make sure that care providers, organisations that represent them and the public have an opportunity to comment on what changes we are proposing.
How are we funded?
Our work is partly funded by grant-in-aid – money that comes from the Government. However, government policy for fee-setting regulators is that chargeable costs must become fully funded by their fees – which means that we must increase our fees and reduce our reliance on government funding.
What are we proposing?
This year, the first and main proposal in our fees consultation is to achieve full chargeable cost recovery over a defined timescale. (This excludes dental care providers.) We're asking people to tell us whether they think this timescale should be:
- Two years, between 2016 and 2018.
- Four years, between 2016 and 2020.
We're also asking if there is a different way that we should aim to achieve full chargeable cost recovery.
Our second proposal is about fees for dental care providers. We already recover our full chargeable costs in the dental sector. We expect those costs to remain the same over 2016/17, after which we expect them to fall. We are holding dental fees at their current level in 2016/17 and propose to decrease charges in 2017/18.
Tell us what you think
You can read the proposals in detail by downloading our consultation document and use our online form to give us your views.