The Health and Social Care Act 2008, under which the Care Quality Commission (CQC) was established, set out a new system by which any person carrying out any “regulated activity” in respect of the provision of adult health and social care had to be registered with CQC as a “service provider”.
The regulated activities are listed in Schedule 1 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014. There are 14 activities which are regulated. They include the provision of personal care along with accommodation for those who require nursing, diagnostic and screening procedures.
If you carry out any regulated activity in England, you must register with the CQC; however there are separate arrangements for regulating health and social care in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Anyone carrying out regulated activities is known as a “service provider”. Service providers may be companies, partnerships or individuals. The precise requirements differ, but, in essence, each service provider must be registered with the CQC.
A “manager” is a person who is in charge of the day-to-day delivery of a service provider’s regulated activities. In general, any service provider that is an organisation must have a registered manager for every regulated activity that it carries out.
If service providers are individuals, they do not need to have a manager unless they are considered to be unfit to manage the regulated activity by the CQC. They should also have a manager if they don’t intend to take on the role of managing the day-to-day provision of regulated activity
The CQC maintains a register of the regulated activities which are authorised to be carried out by each service provider. The register also specifies the locations at which the service provider is entitled to carry out those activities.
Registration is mandatory. Any person who carries out a regulated activity without being registered with CQC to do so is guilty of a criminal offence.
A person guilty of an offence is liable to an unlimited fine or imprisonment for up to one year or, in some cases, both.
It follows that de-registration of a service provider means that it is no longer able to perform any regulated activities and its business must close with all the consequential disruption for its service users and employees.