Enforcement
5 November 2008
Find out about the legal action we take when a registered care
service persistently fails to comply with the law or provides
unsafe care.
Download our enforcement policy:
Get an overview of the policy below.
What is enforcement?
Enforcement is what we call the legal action we
take when a registered care service:
- persistently fails to comply with the law
- provides unsafe care.
Why is our enforcement work important?
We want to make sure that poor quality care services improve for
people who use them, now and in the future.
It is important that we safeguard people who are getting a poor
service, especially if they need support to speak up for
themselves.
What is our enforcement policy?
Service providers are responsible for the quality of their
service.
Good service providers listen to people who use their services
so that they learn what improvements they need to make.
If care providers evaluate the quality of their service and take
action to improve, we will not need to take enforcement action.
We always start by encouraging improvement. But we will take
increasingly strong action if a service persistently fails to
comply with the law.
We will not allow problems to go on unchallenged.
We will always take enforcement action urgently to stop unsafe
care when we find it. We work with others to protect the interests
of people who are not safe and cannot protect themselves.
Sometimes our actions may worry people using the service, for
example if their service could be closed. So we will always think
about how the action we take might affect people.
We will always try to keep people informed about what we are
doing and reassure them that we are acting in their best
interests.
For more details read Our
Enforcement policy
(Word, 447 KB, opens in a new window)
What are our enforcement powers?
If a care service continues to provide a poor service and does
not improve there are a several things we may do.
Step 1: Requirement
We can tell a provider they must make an improvement within 48
hours or within a set timescale.
We call this action an immediate requirement or
a requirement.
We will make a repeated requirement if the
improvement has not taken place but the provider can give a good
reason why.
We will usually only take this action once.
Step 2: Improvement plan
We will ask for an improvement plan from poor
quality services.
The plan must tell us how and when the improvements will be
made.
Step 3: Warning letter
If a service is of poor quality and the required improvements
have not been made we will send a warning
letter.
The letter warns that unless improvements are made within
required timescales we will take stronger action.
Step 4: Enforcement
We can issue a statutory requirement notice if
previous requirements have not been met.
We can issue a formal caution or take action to
prosecute if we believe an offence has been
committed.
We can impose changes to the conditions of
registration if this will improve outcomes for people.
For example, we can reduce the number of people a service can
take if we feel they can't provide a good service for so many.
Or we can change the registration category if we think they
can't cater for a particular need.
We can apply to cancel registration to close
down the service. If the situation is serious enough we can take
urgent action to do this.
How do we make sure we get it right?
We support providers who alert us to failings they have
identified in their service.
As long as the provider is addressing the failures in a
reasonable way, we will not take enforcement action against
them.
But if they do not act reasonably we will not hesitate to use
the powers we have in the best interest of people using the
service.
We have regional plans to make sure we continuously check on all
poor quality services and look for the best way to encourage
improvement.
Because it is so important for us to get it right, inspectors
have planning meetings with their managers to decide what we will
do. We call these management review meetings.
These meetings are an opportunity for us to look at the
information we have about a service and the areas that are causing
concern.
The meetings help us to decide the action we will take and to
form a plan to encourage improvement of the service.
We regularly look at whether the service is making the required
improvements within agreed timescales.
Any actions we take will depend on:
- how seriously the care service is failing to meet its legal
obligations
- the effect this is having on the people using the service
- how the care service provider responds.