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When Care Services Need Clarity, Practical Support Matters There are times when a care service needs more than another internal review. It may be preparing for inspection, responding to regulatory pressure, strengthening governance, stabilising leadership or understanding why improvement is not happening quickly enough. In those moments, experienced external support can help bring clarity, structure…

Adult social care is not facing a demand problem. Underlying need remains strong, driven by demographic pressure, increasing complexity of care and continued local authority demand. CQC’s latest State of Care report notes that new requests for local authority-funded adult social care were 4% higher in 2023/24 than the previous year, and 8% higher than…

CQC has confirmed the next phase of its local authority assurance assessments, with updated guidance, clearer processes and more defined expectations around how councils will be assessed against their adult social care duties. This is not just a local government issue. Local authority performance shapes the environment in which care providers operate, from commissioning and…

Last month, the Care Quality Commission published its updated approach to assessing local authorities. The guidance, published on 8 April 2026, explains how CQC will assess whether local authorities are meeting their adult social care duties under Part 1 of the Care Act 2014. While the update is aimed directly at councils, it is also…

Registered manager gaps remain a significant pressure point in adult social care. Skills for Care’s 2025 workforce report states that, in 2024/25, there were 29,719 CQC-regulated adult social care establishments in England and around 26,400 registered managers in post. The report also identifies a registered manager vacancy rate of 11.4%, equivalent to an average of…