Your local authority is being inspected by the CQC right now. Not your service, not your care home or domiciliary care operation. The council that commissions your services and whether you realise it or not, your organisation’s performance is part of their evidence base.
The Care Quality Commission has begun assessing all 153 local authorities in England against their adult social care duties under the Care Act 2014. Most assessments are already underway, with all on-site activity completing by December 2025. This represents one of the most significant regulatory shifts since the Care Act itself, and the implications for health and social care providers are direct and unavoidable.
Here’s what most providers haven’t grasped yet: when your local authority struggles to evidence strong governance, effective safeguarding, or measurable outcomes, CQC looks closely at their commissioned supply chain. That means your contract performance data, your safeguarding referral patterns, your quality monitoring reports, and your outcomes tracking all feed into how your commissioning authority gets rated.
And when councils face regulatory pressure to improve their ratings, they inevitably tighten expectations of their provider base.
What CQC Is Actually Assessing
The assessment framework evaluates how well local authorities discharge their Care Act duties across four key themes: working with people, providing support, ensuring safety and wellbeing, and leadership. Each theme contains multiple quality statements that councils must evidence through their commissioning, oversight, and partnership arrangements.
CQC is developing detailed rating characteristics explaining what Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement, and Inadequate look like for each quality statement. These characteristics will guide ongoing assessments and establish the benchmark councils must meet.
The evidence councils provide comes largely from their commissioned services. Your safeguarding data, your outcomes measurements, your workforce stability, your quality assurance systems, and your partnership working all contribute to whether your local authority can demonstrate they’re meeting statutory duties effectively.
If a council cannot evidence strong provider oversight, effective market management, or robust quality monitoring across their supply chain, that affects their rating. And councils facing poor ratings will inevitably increase scrutiny of contracted providers.
Why This Changes Provider Expectations
Local authorities under closer CQC scrutiny become more risk-averse and more demanding of their commissioned providers. We’re already seeing this translate into several areas:
Contract monitoring becomes more intensive: Quarterly performance reviews turn into monthly check-ins. Quality monitoring visits increase. Data submission requirements expand. Councils need evidence they’re effectively overseeing their market, which means more oversight of individual providers.
Tender evaluation criteria tighten: Procurement questions increasingly mirror CQC quality statements and rating characteristics. Commissioners need confidence that new providers won’t damage their CQC rating, so evaluation becomes more rigorous around governance, outcomes, workforce culture, and safeguarding systems.
Performance management accelerates: Councils respond faster to quality concerns, contract breaches, or safeguarding issues because CQC expects them to demonstrate swift, effective action when problems emerge in commissioned services.
Evidence requirements increase: Commissioners need more data about outcomes, workforce stability, incident trends, and service user feedback to demonstrate they’re monitoring provider performance effectively. Understanding how to structure evidence and present operational data in formats that support both contract monitoring and tender evaluation becomes essential to maintaining strong commissioner relationships.
The Governance and Leadership Expectations
CQC’s local authority assessments place substantial emphasis on leadership and governance. Councils must demonstrate clear accountability structures, effective risk management, and robust quality assurance frameworks. They evidence this partly through the governance standards they require from commissioned providers.
Expect tender questions to dig deeper into your organisational structure. Who’s accountable for quality? How does your board or senior leadership team receive and respond to quality information? What oversight do you have of frontline delivery? How do you identify and mitigate risks before they become serious incidents?
Vague answers about “strong governance arrangements” won’t suffice anymore. Commissioners need to see documented evidence of governance systems that would satisfy CQC scrutiny if applied to their own organisation.
Workforce Culture Becomes a Scoring Criterion
The assessment framework emphasises workforce culture, inclusion, and staff wellbeing. Councils must demonstrate they’re ensuring providers create safe, supportive environments where staff can raise concerns without fear and where equality, diversity, and inclusion are genuinely embedded.
This translates directly into tender evaluation. Providers must now evidence EDI policies with implementation data, not just policy statements. Whistleblowing arrangements that staff actually use. Fair recruitment practices with demographic monitoring. Staff wellbeing initiatives with participation rates and outcomes. Transparent disciplinary procedures with appropriate oversight.
Culture is no longer soft background information. It’s a measurable evaluation criterion that commissioners will score based on concrete evidence of how your organisation treats its workforce.
Outcomes and Prevention Take Centre Stage
CQC expects councils to demonstrate they’re achieving positive outcomes and preventing needs from escalating. This means commissioners increasingly need outcome data from providers showing how services promote independence, improve wellbeing, and reduce reliance on intensive interventions.
Generic claims about “person-centred care promoting independence” don’t provide the evidence councils need. They want data showing the percentage of service users who’ve reduced support levels, increased community participation, improved health indicators, or achieved personal goals defined in their care plans.
If you’re not currently collecting and analysing outcome data systematically, you’re building a gap that will damage both contract performance reviews and future tender competitiveness.
What You Should Do Now
Waiting until your next tender or contract review to address these expectations puts you at significant disadvantage. The providers positioning themselves advantageously are those strengthening their evidence base now, before procurement pressure forces reactive improvements.
Review your governance documentation: Can you clearly explain your accountability structures, oversight mechanisms, and quality assurance cycles to someone unfamiliar with your organisation? If your governance feels implicit rather than explicit, it won’t evidence well when councils need to demonstrate provider oversight.
Audit your workforce culture evidence: Beyond policies, what data demonstrates your culture? Staff survey results, exit interview themes, whistleblowing reports with outcomes, EDI monitoring data, wellbeing initiative participation rates, training completion statistics. This evidence needs gathering continuously, not retrospectively when tenders require it.
Implement systematic outcome measurement: Identify which outcomes your services aim to achieve, select appropriate measurement tools (Goal Attainment Scaling, ASCOT, service-specific outcome measures), and establish regular data collection and analysis. This becomes your evidence base for demonstrating value.
Strengthen partnership working: Document how you support councils to meet Care Act duties through information sharing, collaborative working, and responsive service delivery. Concrete examples of multi-agency coordination and system-level contribution evidence better than general partnership claims. If you’re finding that your evidence feels fragmented or doesn’t clearly demonstrate the systematic approaches that satisfy regulatory expectations, book a consultation to discuss how to structure your quality assurance and outcomes frameworks more effectively.
The Competitive Advantage
CQC’s local authority assessment programme creates competitive differentiation between providers who recognise the implications early and those who don’t. Councils facing regulatory scrutiny will favour providers who strengthen rather than threaten their CQC rating.
The organisations winning contracts consistently are those demonstrating they understand what councils need to evidence to CQC and actively supporting those requirements through robust governance, clear outcomes, strong workforce culture, and effective partnership working.
This isn’t just about compliance. It’s about positioning yourself as a council’s solution to their regulatory challenges rather than a potential source of concern. That shift in how commissioners perceive you directly affects contract renewals, tender shortlisting, and partnership opportunities.
For ongoing insights into how regulatory changes affect procurement expectations and practical strategies for strengthening your competitive position, explore our sector-specific guidance on health and social care commissioning trends.
