On 15 October 2026, the CQC published its Equality Objectives Annual Report 2025/26, the the first annual report against its 2025-2029 equality objectives. The report reiterates its equality objectives, which are aimed at addressing inequality in health and social care; the progress it has made in the past year, and its key priorities and goals for the coming year.
The CQC’s equality objectives
In 2025/2026, the CQC’s four main equality objectives were:
- Amplifying voices of people more likely to have a poorer care experience or outcomes or difficulty accessing care.
- Develop systems to gather equality data to better understand and respond to equality risks.
- Improve equity by using our regulatory and monitoring activities.
- Our Workforce Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion strategy.
The objectives were aimed at ensuring ‘equitable access, excellent experience, and optimal outcomes’ for people who use health and social care services; those working in the sector; the regulated services; and the CQC’s own workforce.
The report signals a clear intention to continue to embed equality, anti-racism and disability rights considerations more deeply into the CQC’s regulatory activities and statutory functions, including inspections, assessments and enforcement decision-making, in order to address any ‘unfair systems’. This is alongside CQC’s commitment to developing better equality data and using that information to identify regulatory risks.
The CQC highlight their increased focus on gathering equality data, amplifying the experiences of people who are more likely to experience poorer outcomes, and using regulatory action to address inequalities in care. It also confirms that the CQC is embedding these principles within its assessment framework and statutory functions.
For health and social care providers, some of the key takeaways from the report are as follows:
- Equality considerations will be increasingly woven into assessment activity, including local authority assessments and future assessment frameworks;
- More opportunities will continue to be made available for people with lived experience, alongside community engagement programmes, with CQC noting that nearly 3,000 inspections involving ‘Experts by Experience’ have taken place in the past year;
- There is a stronger focus on data collection, specifically equality monitoring data, to help identify any risks or poor practise.
- There is a continued commitment to become an anti-racism organisation, with recommendations from the Participatory Action Research (PAR) being implemented to improve workplace policies, processes and practices; strengthen regulatory practice; and invest in appropriate support and infrastructure.
What does this mean for health and social care providers?
For health and social care providers, the report demonstrates that equality, accessibility and inclusion will remain key considerations in CQC assessments and regulatory decision-making moving forwards. Providers should therefore ensure that these issues are appropriately reflected in their governance, policies and service delivery arrangements to mitigate against the risk of poor inspection outcomes and enforcement action.
It is clear that the CQC is increasingly scrutinising how services identify, monitor and respond to the needs of protected groups and other vulnerable service users. However, as the CQC relies more heavily on lived experience evidence, equality data and feedback from service users, it will be important that inspection findings and enforcement decisions remain evidence-based, proportionate and procedurally fair.
Providers should ensure that they can demonstrate both their commitment to equitable care and the effectiveness of the systems they have in place, while also being prepared to challenge the accuracy of findings within inspection reports or enforcement notices, where the wider evidence base does not support the action taken. As the CQC increasingly embed these changes into its regulatory framework, it will be vital that providers consider whether CQC has applied its equality objectives fairly and consistently.
At Stephensons, our specialist CQC solicitors regularly advise health and social care providers on their regulatory and compliance obligations and assist with challenging factually inaccurate and incomplete inspection reports, as well as decisions to cancel, suspend or vary/impose conditions on registration arising from adverse inspection ratings.
If you require specialist CQC advice, you can contact our specialist CQC solicitors now on 0161 696 6250 or submit an enquiry via our website here.
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