“We want to update you on how we have been developing and testing our approach to assessing local authorities and integrated care systems. These are new powers given to CQC under the Health and Care Act 2022. We have no doubt that these new responsibilities will give us the opportunity to drive improvement and share best practice across health and social care, more than ever before. We also want to offer meaningful independent assurance to the public of how systems are working together to deliver high-quality care.

In July 2022, we published our single assessment framework which will be used to assess local authorities and integrated care systems (ICSs) in a way that is consistent with how we will assess providers. Over the past year, we have worked in partnership with people who use health and social care services, their families, voluntary sector organisations, providers, and other stakeholders to design our approach. We would like to thank those who shared their insights with us, which have helped to inform our methodology.

Our role for local authority assessments, is to assess how well  an authority is delivering under part 1 of the Care Act. To test our methodology for this, we led two test and learn projects in Hampshire and Manchester in summer 2022. We tested aspects of our full assessment approach through the lens of two themes:

• How local authorities work with people — looking at the quality statement ‘assessing needs.’

• Leadership — looking at the quality statement ‘learning, improvement and innovation.’

We found a blend of virtual and on-site assessment worked well, and we produced a short report scoring each local authority against quality statements. The reports were shared with the local authorities we worked with, and their feedback will support development of our approach to reporting on our assessments. In particular, it helped identify challenges in assessment of local authorities for us to address such as how best to include user voice, understanding what good looks like and making sure the follow up report is not too fragmented.

The activity effectively highlighted the strengths and weaknesses and gave us some fantastic feedback which we have incorporated into our approach and methodology.

We hope this gives a flavour of what we have been up to at CQC, and we hope to have further updates on the next stages of this work soon. Delegates will have the opportunity to ask questions at the CQC stand at UK Care Week.

If you are working within a local authority or ICS and would like to get further updates from CQC on this area of work, please register your interest via this short survey. We will add you to the mailing list.