Our enforcement policy for social care services

Find out about the legal action we take when a registered care service persistently fails to comply with the law or provides unsafe care.


What is enforcement?

Enforcement is what we call the legal action we take when a registered care service:

  • persistently fails to comply with the law
  • provides unsafe care.

We want to make sure that poor quality care services improve for people who use them, now and in the future. It is important that we safeguard people who are getting a poor service, especially if they need support to speak up for themselves.

Service providers are responsible for the quality of their service. Good service providers listen to people who use their services so that they learn what improvements they need to make.

If care providers evaluate the quality of their service and take action to improve, we will not need to take enforcement action. We always start by encouraging improvement. But we will take increasingly strong action if a service persistently fails to comply with the law.

We will not allow problems to go on unchallenged. We will always take enforcement action urgently to stop unsafe care when we find it. We work with others to protect the interests of people who are not safe and cannot protect themselves.

Sometimes our actions may worry people using the service, for example if their service could be closed. So we will always think about how the action we take might affect people. We will always try to keep people informed about what we are doing and reassure them that we are acting in their best interests.

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What is our enforcement policy for social care services?

We are currently going through a transition in the legal frame work we operate under. CSCI registered all social care services under the Care Standards Act 2000 (CSA). We will continue to use this act to register, inspect and enforce against social care service (and independent health care) until the new act takes over in October 2010.

Read our enforcement policy for social care services, where we currently take action under the CSA:

Download our enforcement policy for social care services (DOC, 253KB, opens in new window)

The new Act we will be working under is called the Health and Social Care Act 2008. The Act has already made major differences to the way that health and social care services are regulated, for example with effect from 1st April 2009, it established us as the successor to CSCI and the Healthcare Commission and Mental Health Act Commission. The elements of the act are being introduced in a phased way. As of April 2009 we registered the NHS against one regulation, about healthcare acquired infections. For this area of work we have developed a policy about how we will enforce under the new act, the Health and Social Care Act.

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What are our enforcement powers?

If a care service continues to provide a poor service and does not improve there are a several things we may do.

Step 1: Requirement

We can tell a provider they must make an improvement within 48 hours or within a set timescale.

We call this action an immediate requirement or a requirement.

Usually, we will only take this action once. However, we may make a repeated requirement if the improvement has not taken place but the provider can give a good reason why.

Step 2: Improvement plan

We will ask for an improvement plan from poor quality services.

The plan must tell us how and when the improvements will be made.

Step 3: Warning letter

If a service is of poor quality and the required improvements have not been made we will send a warning letter.

The letter warns that unless improvements are made within required timescales we will take stronger action.

Step 4: Enforcement

We can issue a statutory requirement notice if previous requirements have not been met.

We can issue a formal caution or take action to prosecute if we believe an offence has been committed.

We can impose changes to the conditions of registration if this will improve outcomes for people. For example, we can reduce the number of people a service can take if we feel they can't provide a good service for so many. Or we can change the registration category if we think they can't cater for a particular need.

We can apply to cancel registration to close down the service. If the situation is serious enough we can take urgent action to do this.

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How do we make sure we get it right?

We support providers who alert us to failings they have identified in their service. As long as the provider is addressing the failures in a reasonable way, we will not take enforcement action against them. But if they do not act reasonably we will not hesitate to use the powers we have in the best interest of people using the service.

We have regional plans to make sure we continuously check on all poor quality services and look for the best way to encourage improvement. Because it is so important for us to get it right, inspectors have planning meetings with their managers to decide what we will do. We call these management review meetings.

These meetings are an opportunity for us to look at the information we have about a service and the areas that are causing concern. The meetings help us to decide the action we will take and to form a plan to encourage improvement of the service. We regularly look at whether the service is making the required improvements within agreed timescales.

Any actions we take will depend on:

  • how seriously the care service is failing to meet its legal obligations
  • the effect this is having on the people using the service
  • how the care service provider responds.

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