Your rating is six or seven years old, your last report says “Good”, and nothing has happened since. That is exactly why CQC is coming back.

For the last few years, a Good rating has quietly functioned as a shield. If your service was rated Good and nothing went badly wrong, you were unlikely to see an inspector. That era has ended.

CQC has published a programme called Returning to good adult social care services, and it is now live. The page was last updated on 30 July 2026, the approach was rolled out over the summer, and from September onwards it becomes the main route by which long-standing Good services get re-assessed. If your rating is more than six years old, you are in the target group.

Here is what has actually been announced, what CQC will look at, and what you need to have ready.

What CQC has committed to

In its May 2026 update on Priorities for delivering more assessments and tackling aged ratings, CQC confirmed it remains on track to publish reports for at least 9,000 assessments across all sectors by September 2026. For adult social care, it set out its priority order plainly:

services with urgent, emerging risks
services never assessed since registration that the data flags as very high risk
services registered for over a year that have never been assessed
services with a rating over 6 years old

That last line is the one most care home owners have skimmed past. Then CQC added the new bit: a streamlined approach for services currently rated Good in all five key questions, with a registered manager, ratings over six years old, no significant risk in the data, and no ongoing enforcement. In CQC’s own words, it “means we will be able to increase regulatory contact in a proportionate way with services that may not otherwise receive a routine assessment.”

Translated: services that had effectively dropped off the inspection rota are being put back on it.

Are you in the cohort?

CQC will return to services that meet all of the following:

rated Good overall and Good in all 5 key questions
a rating that is at least 6 or 7 years old
a registered manager in post
no indication of a change in rating
do not provide care or treatment to children
have not added the service user band “people with a learning disability and autism” since they were last rated Good
no ongoing enforcement activity

It covers all care homes, including residential and nursing homes and services for autistic people and people with a learning disability where that service user band was already held at the last rating. CQC has confirmed the same approach will be used for supported living and homecare services.

Two practical points fall straight out of that list. First, if you have added the learning disability and autism service user band since your last rating, you are outside this streamlined route and back in the full assessment approach, with Right Support, Right Care, Right Culture in play. Second, whether the visit is announced or unannounced does not change. CQC has been explicit: “This approach will not change our usual approach to whether inspections are announced or unannounced.” For a care home, that generally means no warning.

The 18 quality statements, not 34

This is the part providers most need to understand, and it is being widely misreported.

The Single Assessment Framework still has 34 quality statements. But in a Returning to Good assessment, CQC assesses a fixed, standardised subset of 18, and they are the same across all relevant service types. CQC’s stated reason is simple: fewer statements, more assessments.

Key question	Quality statements assessed
Safe (6)	Learning culture; Safeguarding; Involving people to manage risk; Safe and effective staffing; Safe environments; Medicines optimisation
Effective (4)	Assessing needs; Delivering evidence-based care and treatment; Monitoring and improving outcomes; Consent to care and treatment
Caring (2)	Kindness, compassion and dignity; Independence, choice and control
Responsive (3)	Person-centred care; Listening to and involving people; Equity in experiences and outcomes
Well-led (3)	Shared direction and culture; Governance, management and sustainability; Learning, improvement and innovation

The 16 statements not in scope include Safe systems, pathways and transitions; Infection prevention and control; How staff, teams and services work together; Supporting people to live healthier lives; Treating people as individuals; Responding to people’s immediate needs; Workforce wellbeing and enablement; Care provision, integration and continuity; Providing information; Equity in access; Planning for the future; Capable, compassionate and inclusive leaders; Freedom to speak up; Workforce equality, diversity and inclusion; Partnerships and communities; and Environmental sustainability.

Do not read that list as “areas CQC no longer cares about”. Read it as areas that will not be scored unless something surfaces. CQC has said it will expand the assessment to include additional quality statements if it identifies either concerns or outstanding practice at the planning stage, and where that happens the service reverts to the usual assessment approach and gets the usual full-length report.

The maths nobody explains: your unassessed statements are already scored

Here is the mechanic that decides your outcome, and it is buried in CQC’s scoring guidance rather than the headlines.

When CQC assesses only some quality statements, the remaining ones are not left blank. They are scored automatically from your current published key question rating: Good converts to a score of 3 for every statement not assessed. So a Good-rated care home walks into a Returning to Good assessment with 16 statements already sitting at 3, and 18 live.

Scores run 1 to 4 (1 = significant shortfalls, 2 = some shortfalls, 3 = a good standard, 4 = an exceptional standard). Each key question is converted to a percentage, and 63% to 87% is Good. Then two rules bite:

if the key question score is in the Good range but any one quality statement scores 1, the rating is limited to Requires Improvement
if the score is in the Outstanding range but any statement scores 1 or 2, the rating is limited to Good

And at overall level: two or more key questions at Requires Improvement normally means the location is rated Requires Improvement.

Work that through and the practical picture is this. A scattering of 2s across the 18 will usually still leave you Good, because the carried-forward 3s hold the average up. A single score of 1 will not. One statement scored 1, in any of the five key questions, caps that key question at Requires Improvement on its own. Two of those and your overall rating goes with it.

So the preparation question is not “how do we look brilliant across the board”. It is “where could an inspector reasonably find significant shortfalls in these 18 areas, and have we closed that off?” Medicines, safeguarding, staffing, risk and governance are where 1s actually get given.

You do not have to prove Good. You have to prove everything else.

One of the most useful things in CQC’s guidance is about report writing, and it changes how you should think about evidence.

Where a quality statement is scored 3, CQC has said it will not report on any supporting evidence. The reports in this programme are deliberately shorter, and they do not describe areas where practice continues to meet a good standard. The narrative focuses on scores of 4 (outstanding), 2 (some shortfalls) and 1 (significant shortfalls), and for those, CQC says it “will provide corroborated evidence to support them”.

Two consequences follow, and providers routinely miss both.

If you are content to be Good, you are not required to build an evidence case for it. Good is the assumed position for a service already rated Good, and inspectors do not have to write up why. Chasing a folder of proof for every one of the 18 statements is wasted effort.

But the moment anything moves off 3, evidence decides it. If an inspector proposes a 2 or a 1, that judgement must be backed by corroborated evidence, which is precisely what you challenge at factual accuracy stage. And if you want a 4 for outstanding practice, the burden is on you to make that visible and evidenced during the assessment, because nobody will go looking for it on your behalf.

Go back to your last report. All of it.

Your last inspection report is the single most useful preparation document you own, and most services have not opened it since the day it was published.

Inspectors plan from what CQC already holds: your previous findings, your statutory notifications, safeguarding referrals, complaints, feedback from people using the service and from local partners. If your last report recorded a breach of regulation, a requirement notice, or an “areas for improvement” paragraph, assume it is on the planning note in front of the inspector.

The uncomfortable truth is that a breach identified six or seven years ago was usually closed off with an action plan sent at the time, and then quietly forgotten. Staff have turned over. The manager may have changed twice. Nobody in the building today can say what the breach was, let alone show what changed.

So do this now, properly:

Extract every breach and every recommendation from your last report, including the “should do” items that were never formally breaches.
Write one line per item on what changed, with the date it changed and the named person who owns it now.
Attach the evidence: the revised policy, the audit that now runs, the training records, the sample of care plans that show it in practice today, not in 2019.
Sign it off and date it, with a closure statement from the registered manager and nominated individual confirming each breach remains addressed.
Test it in reality. Pull three care files at random and check the fix is actually visible in them. An action plan that is not true in the files is worse than no action plan at all.

A current, evidenced action plan does two jobs. It answers the obvious opening question before it is asked, and it demonstrates the “Learning, improvement and innovation” statement in a way that is very hard to argue with.

Where the assessment will actually happen: with your people

CQC has shifted the centre of gravity. The programme “focuses on the importance of people’s experiences and outcomes from care, supported by our observations of care and support, which are backed up with reviews of records and other relevant documentation to validate what we have seen and been told.”

Read that order carefully. People first, observation second, records third. Records are now used to corroborate what people say, not to replace it. CQC has also said that where feedback indicates positive experiences and outcomes, the record checks that follow will be “proportionate, targeted and informed by what people say and what we observe.”

Which means a beautifully maintained set of files will not rescue a service where residents seem bored, relatives feel unheard, or staff cannot explain how they raise a concern. Practically:

Talk to your people before CQC does. Run resident and relative feedback now, act on it visibly, and be able to show what changed as a result. That is the Listening to and involving people statement in one move.
Brief visiting professionals. GPs, district nurses, social workers and pharmacists will be asked. Their view of you is part of the evidence.
Prepare staff to explain, not to recite. Inspectors are not testing whether your team can quote a policy. They are testing whether staff can describe how they manage a specific person’s risk, how they seek consent, and what they would do about a concern.
Watch the mealtime and the medicines round. Those two observations carry more weight than any folder in the office.

One live legal trap: consent

“Consent to care and treatment” is one of the 18, and the law under it changed this summer. On 2 June 2026 the Supreme Court handed down its judgment in the Attorney General for Northern Ireland’s reference, known as AGNI, which departed from Cheshire West and removed the “acid test”. Deprivation of liberty is now judged by a multifactorial assessment of the person’s concrete situation, and the Court also held that a person who lacks capacity under the Mental Capacity Act may still be capable of giving valid consent to their confinement for Article 5 purposes. It applied immediately, with no grace period.

If your MCA and DoLS policy, your capacity assessment templates or your staff training still describe the acid test, they are out of date, and they sit directly under a quality statement CQC is going to score. This is a straightforward, avoidable finding. Fix it before the visit.

What is coming after this

Do not rebuild your quality system around the framework that is being consulted on. Do keep an eye on it.

On 24 March 2026 CQC published draft sector-specific assessment frameworks. For adult social care, the draft replaces the 34 quality statements with 24 key lines of enquiry, brings back rating characteristics describing what Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement and Inadequate look like, and removes numerical scoring. Consultation closed on 12 June 2026. A structured programme of pilots runs from June to October 2026, with final evaluation in November 2026. Pilots are voluntary, run alongside normal inspections, and carry no legal standing.

CQC’s own instruction for the interim is clear: “until we implement the new regulatory approach later this year, please continue to refer to the current published guidance on how we assess quality and performance.” In other words, you will be assessed on the current framework, with the 18 statements, for the rest of this year at least.

Your 10-point readiness list

Check your rating date on your CQC profile page. Over six years old and Good across all five? Assume you are in scope.
Refresh the breach and recommendation action plan from your last report, with evidence and dates.
Audit medicines end to end, including MAR charts, PRN protocols, covert administration and temperature records.
Check every safeguarding concern in the last 12 months was referred, notified to CQC, and closed with a lesson recorded.
Reconcile your statutory notifications against your incident log. Gaps here are visible to CQC before they arrive.
Review recruitment files for DBS, references, right to work and gaps in employment history.
Update MCA and DoLS documentation for the AGNI judgment.
Run resident, relative and staff feedback, then publish what you changed because of it.
Bring your governance audits up to date and show the loop closing: audit, action, re-audit.
Rehearse it. A mock assessment against the 18 statements will tell you in a day where your 1s and 2s are hiding.

How Cura Compliance can help

We run full CQC mock inspections with an action plan built around the way CQC actually assesses, and we can scope one specifically against the 18 quality statements in the Returning to Good approach, including a review of your last report’s breaches and a defensible closure statement for each one.

If your policies and procedures are the weak link, CuraFlow gives you a maintained, CQC-mapped policy library so that consent, medicines, safeguarding and governance documents are current rather than seven years old. And our CQC and Ofsted Updates Hub tracks changes like this one as they land.

Get in touch if you want a second pair of eyes on your last report before CQC brings their own.

Frequently asked questions

When will CQC start re-inspecting Good services?

It has already begun. CQC rolled the approach out during summer 2026 and published its Returning to Good guidance on 30 July 2026. Activity steps up from September, as CQC works through its priority list of adult social care services with ratings over six years old.

Will my rating change?

It can go down, stay the same or go up. Scores from the 18 assessed statements are combined with your existing scores for the remaining statements to produce updated key question ratings and an overall rating.

Do I get notice?

The programme does not change CQC’s normal practice on announced and unannounced assessments. Care homes should plan on the basis of no notice.

What happens if the inspector finds a problem?

CQC can widen the assessment to more quality statements and revert to the usual full approach, with a full-length report. Where concerns arise at any stage, inspectors consider whether a full assessment is needed rather than a focused one.

Do I need to prove that we are Good?

No. Where a statement is scored 3, CQC does not report supporting evidence. Evidence matters for anything other than a 3, which means for outstanding practice you want recognised, and for any proposed shortfall you intend to challenge.

Sources

Care Quality Commission, Returning to good adult social care services (updated 30 July 2026)
Care Quality Commission, Priorities for delivering more assessments and tackling aged ratings (26 May 2026)
Care Quality Commission, Piloting, testing and evaluation of new assessment method (4 June 2026)
Care Quality Commission, How we reach a rating
Care Quality Commission, Calculating the first scores using our new approach
Care Quality Commission, Our March update: draft sector-specific assessment frameworks (24 March 2026)
ADASS, Update note following the Supreme Court decision on deprivation of liberty, 2 June 2026