This does not apply to providers that are individuals or partnerships. Individuals and partnerships are governed by Regulation 4.
Providers are responsible for appointing, managing and dismissing directors and board members (or their equivalents). People who have director-level responsibility for the quality and safety of care, treatment and support must meet the fit and proper persons regulation (FPPR) (Regulation 5 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008). This aims to make sure that directors are fit and proper to carry out their role.
You must carry out appropriate checks to make sure that directors are suitable for their role. Our role is to make sure that you have a proper process to make robust assessments to satisfy the FPPR.
Information of concern
CQC may intervene where there is evidence that you have not followed, or you do not have, proper processes for FPPR. Although we do not investigate individual directors, if we receive information of concern about the fitness of a director, we will pass this on to you as the provider.
We will tell you about all concerns relating to your directors and ask you to assess all the information we send. We will have the consent of the third party referrer to do this, and will protect their anonymity wherever possible. However, there may be occasions when we are concerned about the potential risk to people using services, so we will need to progress without consent. We will also inform the director to whom the case refers, but we will not ask for their consent.
You must detail the steps that you have taken to assure the fitness of the director and provide a full response to CQC.
We will carefully review and consider all information. Where we find that your processes are not robust, or you have made an unreasonable decision, we will either:
- contact you to discuss further
- schedule a focused inspection
- take regulatory action in line with our enforcement policy and decision tree if we identify a clear breach of the regulation.