What’s behind Wes Streeting’s quality care reforms?

One of the big themes of Keir Starmer’s government could well end up being accountability in the public sector, which sounds boring until you look at examples of where that is sorely lacking.

Take the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the NHS regulator. Today, Health Secretary Wes Streeting declared it ‘not fit for purpose’ after an interim report found some hospitals had never received a rating, that others hadn’t been reinspected for up to ten years, and that some inspectors seemed to have even less experience of healthcare settings than the average member of the public. That included inspectors who had never been in a hospital before, and ‘an inspector of a care home who’d never met a person with dementia’. No wonder providers had been complaining for a while about the inspection regime. 

The CQC itself admitted last month that ‘the way we work is to working and we are not consistently keeping people who use services safe’, so this review has not come as a surprise to the healthcare world.