Rise of 13% in CQC fees for 2019/20 confirmed
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- Published: Thursday, 28 March 2019 07:35
- Written by News Editor
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Changes to the fees that CQC will charge for the year 2019/20 have now been confirmed and will take effect from 1 April this year. Ian Trenholm, Chief Executive at the Care Quality Commission (CQC) said the rise would “enable us to fulfil our purpose of making sure health and social care services provide people with safe, effective, compassionate and high-quality care.”
The CQC said: “Following consideration of the consultation responses received, the main decisions made on our fees scheme for 2019/20 are as follows.
- We will increase fees for the community social care sector by £1.5 million as part of the final year of a four-year trajectory to full chargeable cost recovery.
- We will increase fees for the dental sector by £0.6 million to better align the cost of regulation with the fees collected.
- We will decrease fees for the residential social care sector by £0.8 million to better align the cost of regulation with the fees collected.
This scheme ensures we complete our trajectory to full cost recovery for all sectors, as required by HM Treasury. This means that our regulatory costs are paid for by provider fees, and no longer subsidised by grant-in-aid funding from the government.”
But the BDA has condemned the 13% hike in fees for 2019/20, with smaller providers disproportionally bearing more of the cost. They have called on the CQC to explain the rationale for this inflation-busting increase with the regulator consistently reporting that dental practices, when compared with all other sectors, present the lowest risk to patient safety.
They have also questioned why corporates will continue to pay proportionally less per surgery than the average high street provider, as the following examples illustrate. From April:
- A dental practice owner with one practice and one associate (or two partners in the same practice) will pay £747, whereas a corporate with 30 locations, will pay £332 per practice
- A dental practice owner with two practices will pay £1,593 (£797 for each practice), whereas a corporate with 30 locations, will pay £332 per practice ie £465 per practice less.
BDA Chair, Mick Armstrong, said:
“The CQC knows that the profession is delivering safe and high-quality care for our patients so we are perplexed why this year’s fees are linked to such a high backdoor tax. We need to know why the cost for registration, monitoring and inspection processes is so expensive for dentists, how these are divided up and what the regulator is doing to curb these rises.
“The BDA raised these concerns with the CQC in our robust response to the regulator’s consultation on fees but these questions have still not been addressed. We welcome the chance to discuss them further with the CQC in the near future. Dentists are willing to pay our fair share, but not a penny more.
“We also have to ask how it can be fair to smaller providers – the backbone of high street dentistry – to pay more as a percentage of what they earn than corporate providers.”
Link to CQC Fees Scheme:
https://www.cqc.org.uk/sites/default/files/20190326%20Fees_scheme_201920%20fees_FINAL.pdf#page11
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