Assessing Council Care

Councils in England will share £4m to help them prepare for assessments of their adult social services by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).

The Department of Health and Social Care is giving each of the 153 authorities a £26,730 one-off payment to help familiarise themselves with the process and effectively engage with their first assessment.

The regulator is currently testing its approach to assessing adults’ services with five authorities: Birmingham, Lincolnshire, North Lincolnshire, Nottingham and Suffolk.

Each of the pilot councils will receive a report of its assessment, an indicative score, of 1-4, for each of nine quality statements and an indicative overall rating (outstanding, good, requires improvement or inadequate), all of which will be published.

It will start its formal assessments of local authorities later this year and is currently working out which councils it will evaluate first. The CQC expects to take two years to assess all of the 153 councils, each of which will receive an overall, single-word rating, as well as scores against the quality statements.