Months from January 2022 to December 2023 are shown at reduced visual weight throughout — see methodology below for why.
Inspections this month Live with playback
Scaled 0–725, the busiest single month on record (June 2026), fixed across the whole run so the needle's position is directly comparable at any point in the animation.
Ratings recorded so far Cumulative over playback
Counts the CQC Overall rating attached to each inspection completed within the months played so far — resets when you change the start month or hit Reset. A significant share of inspections, dentists especially, don't carry a published Overall rating and won't appear in any of the four coloured bars; that's expected, not a gap in the count.
Current inspection backlog Static — today only
Figure 1: today's backlog by age overdue
This panel does not animate with the time-lapse above. A historical backlog size at a past date can't be reliably reconstructed from this data — once a location is re-inspected, any earlier overdue gap leaves no trace in the record. What can be shown reliably is exactly how old today's backlog is, using each location's own rating-implied due date.
What the time-lapse is showing Reference
Each frame lights up the constituencies where CQC completed inspections that month, drawing on the same last_inspection_date field used throughout this site. It's a real, direct read of activity — not modelled or estimated — but it understates true historical volume the further back you go, because a location shows only its most recent inspection: any earlier one that's since been superseded by a later check disappears from the record entirely.
That's why 2022–23 is shown at reduced weight: those months have had years for this to happen, while 2024 onward has had much less time to erode. Play the full range to get a feel for the shape of it.
Backlog by category and age New
The same 32,515-location backlog, split by service category and building cumulatively by how long each location has been overdue — each category's area grows left to right as older cohorts are added in, so the height at the right edge shows the category's full overdue total. Care homes, home care, dentists and GP services are shown individually — the other 13 categories are combined into "All other categories" to keep this readable.
Figure 2: cumulative overdue locations by age, stacked by category
Click any point on the chart to list every provider overdue by that age or younger, for that category. Click "Clear" below to return to just the chart.
"Age overdue" is each location's time since CQC's own rating-implied target review date passed (6 months following Inadequate, 12 following Requires Improvement, 30 following Good or Outstanding, or 24 as a default with no rating).
| Name | Provider | Category | Rating | Last inspection | Months overdue | Constituency |
|---|
Time to fix, at recent pace
Using the trailing months of inspection activity ending at the selected end month:
60-month backlog projection New
The "time to fix" figure above treats the backlog as a fixed number and assumes CQC devotes every inspection to it with nothing else arriving. In reality the register keeps generating new due dates every month whether or not the backlog is being cleared. This chart treats the backlog as a stock instead: it grows by the number of locations reaching their target review date each month, and shrinks by however many inspections are actually completed. Drag the slider to see what a sustained change in pace, relative to the trailing 12-month average, would do to the backlog over the next five years.
Figure 2a: projected backlog over the next 60 months, at the selected pace
This is a scenario tool, not a forecast. "Monthly demand" holds today's register size and rating mix constant and spreads it evenly across each rating's target interval — total locations ÷ the register-wide weighted average interval, both computed live from the same live-fetched data as the rest of this page. It does not model register growth, rating changes, or which specific locations get inspected when. "Current pace" is the trailing 12-month average of completed inspections shown in the time-lapse above; the acceleration multiplier is applied as a flat, sustained change from month 1, not a gradual ramp-up. The projected backlog is capped at the number of locations that currently carry an inspection date at all, since locations never yet inspected sit outside this recency clock entirely. This is a different, forward-looking exercise from the backward backlog reconstruction the Methodology section below describes abandoning — that one tried to infer the backlog's past size and broke down; this one only ever projects forward from today's exact, directly-counted backlog.
Independent scrutiny of CQC, 2011–2026
Three National Audit Office audits, a government-commissioned operational review, and now this site's own data. Figure 3 compares NAO's last CQC-specific audit (2017) to today; Figure 4 sets out the full chronology and what each review concluded; Figure 5 does for the 2024 review what Figure 3 does for 2017 — checking what's changed since, wherever this site's data can speak to it.
Figure 3: CQC in 2017 vs today — what the National Audit Office found then, and what's changed
In October 2017 the NAO published a value-for-money audit of CQC.1 Where its headline facts can be recomputed from this site's own data, they're compared below. Rows that can't be recomputed — enforcement actions, registration/report-publishing timeliness, staff vacancy rates — aren't included, since none of those are derivable from the public location register this site is built from.
| Metric | 2017 (NAO) | 2026 (this site) | Change | NAO source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Active regulated locations | 49,355 (Jun 2017) | 56,616 (22 Jul 2026) | +14.7% | Key facts, p.41 |
| Operating expenditure | £222.0m (2016–17) | £292.7m (2024–25) | +31.8% (nominal) | Key facts & Figure 10, p.41 |
| Share of funding from provider fees | 66% (2016–17) | ≈79% (2024–25) | +13 pts | Key facts, p.41 |
| Good/Outstanding rating share | 82% of all providers (Q1 2017–18) | 86.9% of rated locations; 48.8% of the whole register2 | Quality up slightly; rated base collapsed | Key facts, p.41 |
| Register current against CQC's own target review dates | Essentially 100% — full inspect-and-rate programme just completed | 58.0% overdue (rateable locations only3); median 40 months overdue | From fully current to majority overdue | Key facts & Summary §7, p.4–6; intervals cross-checked against Figure 14, p.391 |
1 National Audit Office, Care Quality Commission – regulating health and social care, HC 409, Session 2017–19, 13 October 2017.
2 The 2017 figure was measured just after CQC completed rating its entire register, so "all providers" and "rated providers" were nearly the same population. That's no longer true: 43.9% of today's register carries no published rating, so both denominators are shown rather than picking one.
3 Dental practices are excluded from this row only. CQC's rating powers don't apply to them (NAO report, paragraph 1.3, footnote 4; confirmed in this data — 99.5% of dentists carry no rating), and they sat outside the 2017 "inspect-and-rate programme" baseline this row is measured against. They stay included everywhere else in this table, including the overall register-size count above. In practice the exclusion barely moves the number — 57.4% overdue with dentists included, 58.0% without — it's applied for definitional consistency with the 2017 baseline, not because it changes the finding.
The NAO's November 2023 report, Reforming adult social care in England (HC 184), is not included here: it audits DHSC and local-authority adult social care funding and reform delivery, and CQC appears only at the margins (market oversight of ~60 providers, and a new duty from 2023 to assess local authorities' Care Act performance) — none of which this site's provider-location data can speak to.
Figure 4: the scrutiny chronology — three NAO audits, then a review that wasn't one
The National Audit Office audited CQC's regulatory performance three times, charting a recovery from an explicit "not achieved value for money" verdict to "value for money is improving." No further NAO audit of CQC's core regulatory performance has been published since 2017. That nine-year gap in independent scrutiny was eventually filled — reactively, and only after activity had already collapsed — by a government-commissioned operational review in October 2024, not an NAO audit.
| Year | Report | Type | Conclusion (condensed) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | The Care Quality Commission: Regulating the quality and safety of health and adult social care | NAO audit | Value for money not achieved. Registration deadlines missed (bar NHS trusts); compliance and inspection activity fell. Responsibility judged shared between CQC and the Department, not CQC's alone. |
| 2015 | Capacity and capability to regulate the quality and safety of health and adult social care | NAO audit | No formal verdict given. Substantial progress rebuilding the regulatory model and cost data, but performance and impact data still too limited to judge effectiveness; a third of staff still expected to have under 12 months' tenure once fully recruited. |
| 2017 | Care Quality Commission – regulating health and social care | NAO audit | Value for money improving. First full inspect-and-rate programme just completed, vacancies down sharply, more enforcement, better self-measurement. Timeliness and judgement-consistency flagged as the risks to sustaining it. |
| 2024 | Review into the operational effectiveness of the Care Quality Commission (the Dash review) | Government-commissioned review — not an NAO audit | Significant operational failings. Inspection and assessment activity roughly halved since 2019–20; registration backlog worsened; around 500 unpublished inspection reports; ratings years out of date in places, including at least one from 2015. |
Conclusions are condensed paraphrases of each report's own summary/conclusion section, for navigability — not verbatim quotation. Source paragraphs: 2011 report, paras 19–20; 2015 report, paras 21–22; 2017 report, paras 25–26; 2024 review, as summarised in its published findings.
Figure 5: the Dash review's baseline (30 July 2024) vs today
Alongside its full report, the Dash review published a supplementary data-tables workbook built from CQC's internal management information — a genuine historical record, not a reconstruction from a single snapshot the way this site's own time-lapse is. Where its tables overlap with what this site can measure, they're compared below. Rows that need a full rating-history time series per location — average time to reinspection after a Requires Improvement or Inadequate rating, for example — aren't included, because a single snapshot can't reconstruct that.
| Metric | 30 Jul 2024 (Dash/DHSC) | Today (this site) | Change | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Inspections/assessments completed, Jan–Jul window | 1,820 (Jan–Jul 2024) | 2,332 (Jan–Jul 2025); 3,888 (Jan–Jul 2026)1 | Roughly doubled over two years | DHSC supplementary Table 8; this site's reconstruction |
| Average age of a location's current rating | 3.86 years | 4.55 years | +0.7 years — still rising, but slower than the 1:1 pace it would rise at with zero reinspection activity | DHSC supplementary Table 11; this site's data |
| Proportion of rateable locations holding a current rating | 80.7% (DHSC's exact scope) | ≈71.7% (this site's approximate equivalent scope2) | Down roughly 9 points | DHSC supplementary Table 1/4; this site's approximate replication |
| Register-wide backlog against CQC's own target review dates | Not measured in this form by the Dash review | 57.4% overdue (58.0% excl. dentists); median 40 months overdue | This site's own original contribution — see Methodology below | This site's backlog snapshot |
| Oldest named "current" ratings flagged by the review | e.g. Crawley Hospital (Good, rated Jun 2014); Pilgrims Hospice Ashford (Outstanding, rated Jan 2015) | Both since reinspected and refreshed — Crawley Hospital Aug 2025, Pilgrims Hospice Ashford Oct 20253 | Cleared | DHSC supplementary Table 16/17; this site, matched by name |
1 This site's reconstruction undercounts older periods — confirmed directly against DHSC's true figures: our reconstruction captured 76% of DHSC's true 2022 total, 80% of 2023, and 91.5% of Jan–Jul 2024. Coverage improves the closer a period sits to today's snapshot, so the 2025 and 2026 figures shown are likely closer to complete than 2024's was — meaning the true growth in activity is probably at least as strong as these numbers suggest, not weaker.
2 DHSC's "locations CQC had the power to rate" excludes primary dental services, prisons and immigration removal centres, blood and transplant services, and several other niche categories, plus NHS mental health/community trusts (rated at provider rather than location level). This site's taxonomy doesn't map exactly onto that definition; the equivalent shown here excludes dentists, prison healthcare and blood/transplant locations only, as the closest available approximation — treat as indicative, not an exact replication.
3 Matched by location name only, not CQC's internal location ID, since that ID isn't in this site's data. Two of the review's four named oldest-rating examples matched cleanly; a third (Mount Vernon Hospital) had an ambiguous match against two differently-provider-labelled entries in this site's data and was left out rather than reported unreliably.
Methodology and limits
The time-lapse (the "how much activity" side). Built from every location's last_inspection_date, grouped by the month it falls in and by constituency. This field records CQC's currently most recent inspection per location, not a full inspection history — so a count shown for any past month is a lower bound on what actually happened then, and that lower bound gets weaker the further back you go, because each re-inspection since has erased the record of what it replaced. Data before January 2022 was excluded entirely from this page for being too eroded to show fairly; January 2022 to December 2023 is included but shown at reduced visual weight for the same reason, in a less severe form.
The backlog (the "how much is outstanding" side). This is a direct count from today's snapshot — 32,515 of 56,616 locations (57.4%) are currently past CQC's own target review date for their rating. This number, and its age breakdown, is exact and doesn't rely on modelling. What it deliberately does not do is show how the backlog's size has changed over time: that would require knowing every location's inspection status on past dates, which isn't reconstructable from a single snapshot once a location has since been fixed. We tried a flow-based backward estimate and it produced impossible results (implying a negative backlog within about 18 months), which is why this page doesn't attempt one.
"Time to fix." Backlog ÷ average monthly inspections over the trailing N months you select. This assumes CQC devotes all inspection capacity to the backlog with no other work arriving — a benchmark against recent demonstrated pace, not a forecast of what will actually happen. Recency banding (target review intervals) follows the same CQC-published guidance used throughout this site: 6 months following an Inadequate rating, 12 months following Requires Improvement, 30 months following Good or Outstanding, or 24 months as a default where no rating is held.
This analysis is produced by SDWH Limited for information purposes only, using CQC's own published data under the Open Government Licence. It does not constitute regulatory advice and is not endorsed by the Care Quality Commission.