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Your service was rated good in 2019. CQC is coming back to check it still holds.

The rating on your homepage is dated 2019. The registered manager who earned it has moved on, and the evidence folder behind it has not been opened in a long time. CQC's returning to good adult social care services work is aimed at that exact position: services rated good long enough ago that nobody can say with confidence the rating still describes the service today.

The CQC Return to Good eligibility criteria are published and specific, so you can work out whether your service is in scope.

What Return to Good is, and which services are eligible

CQC's guidance page, Returning to good adult social care services, was last updated on 30 July 2026. The stated purpose:

"We are returning to services rated as good to confirm whether the rating remains accurate."

Confirmation is the job. Services with ongoing enforcement activity are excluded, which leaves providers whose good rating has aged without anyone testing whether it still holds.

CQC will return to services that:

"are rated as good overall and good in all 5 key questions
have a rating that is at least 6 or 7 years old (to align with our current adult social care assessment priorities)
have a registered manager
present no indication of a change in rating
do not provide care or treatment to children
have not added the service user band of 'people with a learning disability and autism' since they were last rated as good
have no ongoing enforcement activity."

The scope covers all care homes, residential and nursing, plus supported living and homecare, and services for autistic people and people with a learning disability where that group was already being served at the last rating. A domiciliary care agency rated good in 2019 sits on this list on the same terms as a nursing home.

Six of the seven can be answered from your own records. "No indication of a change in rating" is CQC's judgement, not yours.

Why a six-year-old rating puts you near the front of the queue

CQC's published adult social care assessment priorities, in Priorities for delivering more assessments and tackling aged ratings of 26 May 2026, name four groups of service. The fourth:

"Services with a rating over 6 years old."

On the same page, CQC states: "We continue to be on track to meet our target to publish reports for at least 9,000 assessments across all sectors by September 2026." A published volume target alongside a published priority list makes the next move predictable.

Adult social care is assessed under the single assessment framework, and that is the framework the eighteen quality statements below are drawn from. CQC published four initial draft sector-specific frameworks on 24 March 2026 and took feedback until 12 June 2026. Pilots run from June to October 2026 with final evaluation in November 2026, and no date has been published on which the adult social care framework takes effect. CQC's furthest wording is "later this year".

The 18 quality statements assessed under CQC Return to Good

Eighteen quality statements are assessed, streamlined from the full set of 34.

Safe: learning culture; safeguarding; involving people to manage risk; safe and effective staffing; safe environments; medicines optimisation.

Effective: assessing needs; delivering evidence-based care and treatment; monitoring and improving outcomes; consent to care and treatment.

Caring: kindness, compassion and dignity; independence, choice and control.

Responsive: person-centred care; listening to and involving people; equity in experiences and outcomes.

Well-led: shared direction and culture; governance, management and sustainability; learning, improvement and innovation.

Safe and effective staffing sits under Safe. That is where recruitment and workforce evidence is assessed.

How CQC gathers evidence and scores each statement

The approach puts greater focus on people's experiences and outcomes. CQC gathers that by speaking with people using the service, their visitors, visiting professionals, staff and leaders, and by observing care being delivered.

As an illustration, an assessor might spend an afternoon in a lounge and ask a resident what happens when she presses the call bell at two in the morning. The visiting district nurse might be asked whether the notes she needs are ready. Answers of that kind set the direction of the rest of the assessment.

Where feedback indicates positive experiences, CQC substantiates those findings with checks on records and documents that are "proportionate, targeted and informed by what people say and what we observe". Whether a visit is announced or unannounced is unchanged.

The eighteen statements are a starting position. CQC can add to them:

"We will expand the assessment to include additional quality statements if we identify either concerns or outstanding practice during the planning stage."

Where that happens, the service reverts to CQC's usual published approach and receives a usual style report. The shorter route is decided before anyone arrives, on the basis of what CQC already holds.

Each quality statement is scored from one to four. A four indicates an outstanding standard. A two indicates some shortfalls and a one indicates significant shortfalls. For scores of four, two and one, CQC provides corroborated evidence to support them. For a score of three it does not.

A score of three leaves nothing published behind it, so your own record is the only account of what the assessor saw.

What to have ready under safe and effective staffing

Two things sit inside the eighteen statements and can be prepared now.

The first is your workforce evidence. Regulation 19(3) of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014 requires the Schedule 3 information to be available for each person employed. Schedule 3 defines satisfactory as "satisfactory in the opinion of the Commission", and CQC confirms that electronic or online evidence is acceptable in place of paper.

The second is the boundary around agency and bank staff. CQC's Regulation 19 guidance states that "person employed" includes volunteers, contractors, agency and bank staff, and that where checks are carried out by another party, providers "must assure themselves that all checks are complete and satisfactory". A provider that treats the agency's file as the end of the matter has an evidence gap. CQC's position is that a failure to evidence safe recruitment practice is likely to result in a breach of regulation, which could affect the rating under Safe, Effective and/or Well-led. The companion piece in this series sets out what you still owe CQC when an agency runs the checks. Our guide to onboarding agency staff safely covers the placement checks themselves.

Six years is long enough for staff to turn over several times and for employment gap explanations to go unrecorded because the person who took them has left. The evidence may be thinner than the care.

Credentially holds staff compliance records against Schedule 3 in one place, with automated primary source verification, DBS integration and real-time monitoring of expiring items across every location. For groups registered as several legal entities, that gives a single view of workforce compliance the registration structure does not produce on its own.

Our CQC inspection preparation checklist for workforce compliance sets out what to assemble under Safe and Well-led, item by item.

An old good rating is an asset with an unknown expiry

A good rating from 2019 is still doing commercial work for you. It sits on your website and it is asked for in local authority tendering. Nobody knows how long it has left.

The eligibility list is public. Read the seven criteria against your service, and if you match, put a date in the plan.

References

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