Working in care
What regulation checks
A regulated care service in England answers to the Care Quality Commission: registration before it may operate, inspection on a cycle, and one of four ratings published where anyone can read it. The ratings are public, dated and checkable, which is the whole point of them.
Last checked on 12 September 2026
What does registration actually do?
It makes the service answerable. A provider carrying on a regulated activity must be registered with the Care Quality Commission, and registration is not a certificate on the wall but a continuing condition: the provider declares what it does and where, and the register is public. An organisation that cannot be found on the register is either not regulated or not registered, and the difference matters more than any welcome page.
Other regulated trades run on the same architecture. The maritime desk that reads commercial shipping decisions follows SOLAS, MARPOL and port state control the way this desk follows registration and inspection: a named rulebook, a named inspector, and a record the public can open. Regulation that cannot be looked up is not regulation, only reassurance.
What does an inspection look at?
At the service against its own framework, published as a rating. The CQC inspects against five questions that have stayed stable: safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led, and publishes a rating of outstanding, good, requires improvement or inadequate. The words are ordinary on purpose; what gives them weight is that they are applied by an inspectorate that is not the provider, on a date that is printed.
The Commission publishes its Care Directory weekly and its directories with filters and ratings monthly: the versions listed when the page was read were 4 August 2026 for the monthly files and 2 September 2026 for the weekly one.
Care Quality Commission, Using CQC data. cqc.org.uk, read on 12 September 2026.
What can a member of the public actually check?
More than is usually checked. The provider's entry on the register, its latest inspection report in full rather than its summary line, the date of that inspection, and whether any requirement notices or enforcement sit against it. A rating that is four years old is a different fact from a rating that is four months old, and the date is on the record. what a provider must do covers the duties the inspection is measuring against.
What if the record raises a worry?
Then the worry has somewhere to go that is not a conversation at the door. Safeguarding concerns about an adult with care and support needs sit under section 42 of the Care Act, the enquiry duty, and the council is the door for those. Concerns about a registered service can also be raised with the CQC itself. The route for reopening a placement that no longer looks right is the review: changing your support describes it.
Care Act 2014, section 42, Enquiry by local authority. Version Latest available (Revised) as at 2 September 2026, legislation.gov.uk, read on 12 September 2026.
What this page is
This page explains what registration and inspection mean for a care service in England. It is not an assessment of any provider, and ratings change; the register and the report carry the current state, not this page. The Care Act 2014 applies in England only.
Sources read for this page
- Care Quality Commission, Using CQC data
- Care Act 2014, revised text on legislation.gov.uk, version Latest available (Revised) as at 2 September 2026
- Skills for Care, The state of the adult social care sector and workforce in England, published 15 October 2025
Each source above was opened on 3 September 2026. Where a page here prints a section number or a figure, the source line beside it names the version that number was read from.