We have started this year by continuing our work on rebuilding our regulation.
We’re ahead of our planned schedule of carrying out assessments. In November 2025, we carried out 50% more inspections than in November 2024 and have completed over 5,000 assessments since April last year.
We are moving in the right direction, but we know we need to do more.
Looking ahead: a clear, sequenced improvement plan
Last November, we set out our improvement plans for 2026-28, with a focus on immediate actions until the end of 2026 and longer-term planning to deliver the changes up to the end of 2028. In December, we outlined our next steps for 2026 across our rebuilding priorities.
We have a clear plan of what we need to achieve and how we will deliver this work, reflecting lessons learned from the past. We are making improvements to:
- how we regulate
- how we are organised
- our digital services.
Since starting our improvement work, we have made progress in a number of areas:
- consulting on proposed changes to our assessment framework with high levels of engagement from providers, partners, colleagues and the public
- our consultation, which closed in December, received 1,703 submissions – one of the highest consultation response rates we have ever received – with a wealth of constructive, solution-focused feedback that will shape what we do next
- holding positive discussions specific to each health and adult social care sector to consider the characteristics of our ratings and what good quality care should look like, led by our 4 Chief Inspectors
- strengthening our regulation through the leadership of our 4 Chief Inspectors, who now lead operational inspection teams specific to the sectors we regulate
- exploring the potential use of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to support productivity, through a small number of early pilots.
What’s next?
We’ll be publishing a response to summarise the feedback from our public consultation and will continue conversations about how we can support ongoing improvements to our work.
Using all the feedback gathered from the assessment framework consultation, engagement events and surveys, we will develop draft assessment frameworks.
Following this, we’ll engage further to help refine the frameworks and develop definitions of what good health and care looks like to develop the characteristics that underpin each of our 4 ratings – called rating characteristics. We will do this through both online and face-to-face engagement activity with providers, colleagues and the public, starting from April.
To support our regulatory processes, we’ll be co-designing new digital and technology systems.
We will continue to strengthen our registration activity by making further improvements to the workflow processes that handle applications to register as a new service provider. This builds on changes we made to our process for registering homecare services, implemented last July. Our longer-term aim is to implement an improved application process for services across all health and care sectors.