Guide
CQC ratings explained
Every care home and home care agency in England is inspected by the Care Quality Commission and given one of four ratings. The rating is the first thing most families look at, and it is a fair place to start. It is also a snapshot, sometimes an old one, and the report behind it says far more than the word on the badge. Here is how to read both.
The four ratings
A service that has not yet been inspected shows as not yet rated. That is normal for a new service or one that has recently changed hands, and says nothing either way. 1,204 services are in that position today.
The five questions inspectors ask
Inspectors rate the service on five key questions, and each gets its own rating in the report:
- Safe: Are people protected from harm? Staffing, medicines, infection control, safeguarding.
- Effective: Does the care work? Training, consent, food and drink, working with GPs and nurses.
- Caring: Are people treated with kindness and dignity?
- Responsive: Is care built around the person? Care plans, activities, complaints.
- Well-led: Is the service run well? The manager, the culture, how problems get found and fixed.
The overall rating is not an average. A service with a Requires improvement in Safe or Well-led will normally be Requires improvement overall, whatever the other three say. That is deliberate: those two questions are where harm starts. Every service page here shows all five, with what inspectors said about each.
Good in Caring and Requires improvement in Safe is a common pattern. It means kind staff, stretched too thin.
How old a rating can be
The CQC moved away from routine inspections on a fixed cycle some years ago. Services rated Good or Outstanding may go several years between visits; services rated lower are seen sooner. It is not unusual to find a Good rating from four or five years ago, under a different manager, possibly a different owner.
Every service page on this site shows the date the rating was published and the rating history before it. If the current rating is more than two or three years old, treat it as history and look for newer signals: whether the manager named in the report is still there, the service’s own recent reviews, and what you see when you visit.
How to read the report
Our explanation on each page follows the order that matters:
- The headline. What the inspectors found, in one sentence, and the rating.
- Safe and Well-led. Staffing numbers, medicines, whether risks like falls were managed, whether there is a registered manager and whether the provider knew about problems before the inspectors did.
- What people said. The quotes from residents, clients and relatives. Inspectors choose them carefully, and we quote them back.
- Breaches and enforcement. A requirement notice means the service was told to fix something; a warning notice, conditions on registration or special measures are more serious.
- The questions to ask. Drawn from the report, so you go into a visit or a phone call knowing what to press on.
If the service is part of a group, look at the provider’s other services too. Every page lists them, and a pattern across a group is worth more than one report.
What a rating does not tell you
- Whether the service is right for this person: a Good dementia unit and a Good home for younger adults are very different places
- What it costs, or whether the fee includes what you need
- Whether the staff you meet on a visit will still be there in a year
- How the food tastes, whether the garden is used, whether anyone laughs
- What has happened since the inspection date
Using ratings to shortlist
A reasonable rule: shortlist Good and Outstanding services first, read the report of any Requires improvement service before ruling it out, and only consider an Inadequate service if the report is recent, the problems were specific, and you have seen for yourself that they have been fixed. Then visit, or for home care, ask to meet the carers who would come.
Or take a different route altogether. Many families who start by comparing agencies and homes end up hiring a private carer directly, chosen by them, without an agency in between.