Regulatory fees for assessing integrated care systems: consultation outcome

Introduction

We are the independent regulator of health and social care in England. The Health and Social Care Act 2008 (as amended by the Health and Care Act 2022) gives us a new duty to carry out reviews and performance assessment of integrated care systems.

Integrated care systems are partnerships of organisations that come together to plan and deliver joined-up health and care services to improve the lives of people who live and work in their area. There are 42 integrated care boards across England to plan, manage and arrange health services in a geographical area.

Our regulatory fee model is compliant with section 6 of HM Treasury’s guidance on managing public money. It assists us to recover the full regulatory cost associated with discharging our regulatory duties. As such, and in the absence of funding from elsewhere, we are expected to charge a fee for any new regulatory function we undertake. The Care Quality Commission (Fees) (Reviews and Performance Assessments: Integrated Care System) Regulations 2023 prescribes this new function for the purposes of section 85 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008. This enables CQC to charge fees to cover the cost of performing that function.

We recently consulted on our proposed approach to recovering our regulatory costs for assessing integrated care systems. In our consultation we proposed to recover our regulatory costs for assessing integrated care systems by charging integrated care boards an annual regulatory fee. We also outlined alternative options we considered, including the option to charge health and social care providers and/or local authorities a regulatory fee for assessing integrated care systems.

We received 41 responses to our public consultation, open for 8 weeks between 26 October 2023 and 21 December 2023. Of the total responses, 17 respondents were responding on behalf of an organisation and 24 responses were from individual respondents. We received responses from 8 integrated care boards as well as responses from 2 organisations representing views of integrated care boards.

We considered and analysed all consultation responses. Here, we summarise the overarching themes from respondents and outline our response to the themes. In the annex we include a summary of the consultation responses for each question in further detail.