Consultation: CQC Proposed charges to registered providers 2015/16

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) today publishes a consultation about the fees that it proposes to charge registered providers in 2015/16.

The fees paid by providers, together with grant-in-aid from the government, are central to ensuring that CQC can carry out the job it is committed to delivering – registering and inspecting health and adult social care providers to make sure they provide safe, effective, compassionate and high-quality care, monitoring them to make sure they continue to do so, and taking action if they don’t.

Earlier this year, CQC consulted on its “new approach” to monitoring, inspecting and rating health and adult social care services. The main elements of the new approach are larger, more specialist and expert inspection teams led by chief inspectors, greater involvement in inspections by members of the public with personal experience of services, better use of information to identify risks and plan inspections, ratings for all health and adult social care services and tougher registration checks.

The impact of these changes and developing a model that everyone can have confidence in is an increased cost of regulation. Our budget is a combination of grant-in-aid from the government and from fees paid by providers. To meet government policy of recovering all chargeable costs from fees, we must increase the proportion of cost recovery from fees and reduce the amount of funding from the taxpayer, bringing us closer and more accountable to the sectors we regulate. This consultation sets out the proposal we are making to change the balance of funding to increase cost recovery from provider fees in 2015/16.

This year’s consultation includes proposals to:
•     Increase annual fees for all registered providers except for the dental sector.
•    Amend the fee scheme for independent healthcare providers whose fees increased due only to structural changes made in the 2013/14 fees scheme

With these increases included, health and care providers will still typically pay 1% or less of their income in fees to CQC.
The impact of the proposed fee increase on a typical NHS GP, care home and NHS trust would be:
•    NHS GP – £69  
•    Care home – £238
•    NHS trust – £6458

We are not proposing to increase fee charges for dental providers as we already recover the full chargeable costs of regulating this sector.

CQC is committed to making sure that fee charges are fair, proportionate and transparent. We are also committed to ensuring that we closely monitor the costs of our regulatory work, continuously seek to improve its efficiency, evaluate its effectiveness and demonstrate the value of our approach to the public, the taxpayer and the sectors we regulate.

The proposals in this consultation have been developed with CQC’s Fees Advisory Panel, which includes representatives from the providers we regulate.

The consultation runs until noon on 9 January 2015.