Our legal powers
Find out what we can do if things go wrong.
If adult social care services do not meet national minimum
standards, we place conditions on them to improve and they must
meet those conditions by law.
We can close them down if the problems are very serious or if
they fail to improve. If we judge that people are in any immediate
danger of suffering harm, we can force care services to
close immediately.
We work closely with local councils, health services and the
police to ensure protection of people who use care services who
might be at risk of abuse. This policy is called protection
of vulnerable adults (POVA).
We also inspect local councils and care providers to check they
have proper systems in place to deal with any
complaints they receive. They have to do this by
law. We do not investigate complaints for them, but if people tell
us about a complaint we take it into account when we assess the
service.