The CQC Has a New Chief Executive. Here’s Why Every Registered Manager Should Care.

 

There’s a new name at the top of the Care Quality Commission, and if you run or manage a CQC-registered service, it’s worth five minutes of your time.

 

Not because a change of face at the top changes your Tuesday. But because who’s steering the regulator, and what she’s inherited, tells you exactly where the pressure is going to land next.

On 16 July 2026, the CQC confirmed Emily Miles as its new permanent Chief Executive. She’s not a clinician, and she’s not come up through health and social care. She’s a career regulator, most recently running the Food Standards Agency through five turbulent years. That choice says a lot about what the CQC’s board thinks it needs right now, and it’s not more inspectors quoting the Fundamental Standards back at providers. It’s someone who knows how to fix a broken regulatory machine.

Here’s what you need to know, and what we think you should be doing about it.

 

TL;DR

 

• Emily Miles, currently Defra’s Director General for Food, Farming and Biosecurity and previously Chief Executive of the Food Standards Agency (2019–2024), was named permanent Chief Executive of the Care Quality Commission on 16 July 2026. She takes up the post in the autumn (widely reported as October 2026), succeeding interim CEO Dr Arun Chopra.
• She inherits a regulator mid-turnaround after Dr Penny Dash’s damning 2024 review. Assessment backlogs have been slashed (from around 500 to 4), but the discredited Single Assessment Framework is being replaced by four sector-specific frameworks, currently being piloted with implementation likely late 2026 or into 2027.
• Her appointment signals continuity, not a change of direction. Expect the same focus on operational performance, consistency, and rebuilding trust, delivered by someone whose background is in regulatory turnaround rather than clinical care.
• For providers, this means: don’t wait for the new framework to sort your evidence out, get your registration paperwork airtight before you submit, and expect the regulator to act on a single concern raised by a family member or local authority just as readily as on a scheduled inspection.

 

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Who is Emily Miles, and why her?

 

Miles has spent roughly 24 years in public service, most of it in home affairs, Whitehall policy roles, and food regulation. She was a policy adviser to Tony Blair between 2002 and 2005, led the closure of the historic asylum backlog at the UK Border Agency, and helped establish the College of Policing. She moved into Defra in 2015, steering the department’s EU Exit planning, before taking the top job at the Food Standards Agency in September 2019.

Her five years running the FSA are the closest thing she has to a dry run for the CQC. She led the agency through the post-Brexit shift to new border controls on food, the pandemic, a major meat-fraud investigation, and listeria outbreaks, all while championing transparency as the backbone of consumer protection. She returned to Defra in September 2024 as Director General for Food, Farming and Biosecurity, a role she’s held until now.

Interim CQC Chair Kay Boycott was explicit about why the board chose her: “experience leading organisations through challenging times, driving a high-performance culture, delivering large-scale change programmes, and rebuilding stakeholder trust.” Read between the lines and the message is clear. The CQC didn’t go looking for a clinician. It went looking for someone who has rebuilt a discredited national regulator before and can do it again.

Miles herself has framed her priorities around protection and improvement working together: supporting services to get better, not just marking their homework, while encouraging joined-up working across health and care so people get good care when they need it.

One open question worth thinking about: her background is in food and border regulation, not health or social care delivery. Whether that experience translates to overseeing hospitals, care homes and mental health services will only become clear once she’s actually in post. It’s a fair thing for providers to be watching for.

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The regulator she’s walking into:

 

This is the part that actually matters for your service.

The CQC has spent the last two years digging out of a hole. Dr Penny Dash’s 2024 review found the organisation “not fit for purpose”: inspections had dropped from around 15,800 a year in 2019/20 to just 6,700 by 2023/24, registration backlogs had ballooned (54% of applications sitting over ten weeks by 2024, up from 22% the year before), and re-inspection after an “inadequate” rating had slowed to an average of 136 days. Some services haven’t been re-inspected in years and are still carrying ratings that no longer reflect reality.

Since then, under interim CEO Dr Arun Chopra, there’s been real progress. The backlog of unpublished assessment reports has dropped from around 500 to just 4. The CQC set itself a target of 9,000 published assessments by September 2026 and, as of its most recent update, was ahead of that target with 4,308 already published and assessment volumes up 50% year on year. The organisation has also restructured into four sector-led inspectorates, each with its own Chief Inspector.

But the framework underneath all of this is still being rebuilt. The Single Assessment Framework, the one every provider has been assessed against since 2023/2024, was judged a failure by Sir Mike Richards’s review: poorly explained, barely piloted, and confusing for providers and inspectors alike. The CQC published draft replacement frameworks for each sector, including adult social care, in March 2026. Numerical scoring is being scrapped. Rating characteristics are coming back, meaning inspectors will lean more on professional judgment and less on a scorecard. Pilots are running through to October 2026, with a decision on rollout expected by the end of the year, though it could easily slip into 2027.

Meanwhile, registration has changed too. Since 9 February 2026, the CQC has stopped chasing incomplete applications. If your paperwork isn’t right the first time, it gets rejected rather than queried. That’s a real shift in risk for anyone planning to register a new service, add a location, or change a registered manager.

And despite the operational recovery, the sector’s frustration hasn’t gone away. The Homecare Association’s most recent analysis found 70.3% of homecare providers either have no CQC rating at all or one that’s four to eight years out of date, a figure that’s got worse, not better, over the past year. As Dr Jane Townson OBE, the Association’s CEO, put it: “the CQC is falling further behind in regulating homecare.” That’s the tension Miles is walking into. Real internal progress, but a sector still waiting to feel the benefit.

Notably, the major provider bodies (Care England, the Homecare Association, the National Care Forum, the National Care Association) hadn’t issued formal reaction to Miles’s appointment at the time of writing. That’s not unusual this early; expect statements closer to her actual start date.

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What this means for you, right now

 

None of this is abstract. Here’s what it should change about how you’re spending your time between now and the new framework landing.

Stop chasing the old framework and start evidencing outcomes. The five key questions (Safe, Effective, Caring, Responsive, Well-led) aren’t going anywhere, and neither are the Fundamental Standards underneath them. What’s changing is how your evidence gets read. If your quality assurance is built entirely around ticking off SAF quality statements, you’re optimising for a system that’s being retired. Build your evidence around genuine, demonstrable outcomes instead, because that’s what will carry over regardless of which framework is in place when your next assessment lands.

Treat every registration submission as one-shot. With incomplete applications now rejected rather than queried, there’s no safety net for a rushed application. Whether it’s a new registration, a change of registered manager, or a variation to your conditions, it needs to be complete and inspection-ready before it goes anywhere near the CQC portal.

Assume you’re being watched between inspections, not just during them. The CQC’s move to intelligence-led, risk-based prioritisation means a single complaint, a concerned family member, or feedback from a local authority can trigger activity long before your next scheduled visit. If you’ve genuinely improved since your last rating, don’t wait for the CQC to notice. Ask for a reassessment and bring the evidence.

Keep an eye on the pilots and Miles’s early priorities. As the sector-specific adult social care framework moves through pilot and towards implementation, and as Miles settles into the role from the autumn, the detail will start to firm up. What she prioritises in her first few months, particularly around adult social care specifically, will tell you a lot about where the regulatory pressure lands next.

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How Kata Care can help you get ahead of this

 

This is exactly the kind of shift we exist to help providers navigate. A mock inspection with Kata Care gives you an honest, current picture of where your evidence actually stands, run by consultants who include current and former CQC inspectors, and it means you’re not caught out whichever framework you’re assessed against next.

If you’ve got a registration, variation, or new location on the horizon, we can make sure it’s complete and inspection-ready the first time, so you’re not one of the applications getting bounced back under the new rules.

And if you’ve improved since your last rating and it’s time the CQC knew about it, we can help you build the case and the evidence to back it up.

Get in touch for a free initial consultation, or run our quick CQC readiness scorecard to see where you stand. Whoever’s in charge at the CQC, being genuinely ready is still the only thing that actually protects your service.

Book a free consultation with Kata Care →