After the CQC Consultation Closes: How to Prepare for the New Adult Social Care Framework

The CQC's consultation on the new adult social care assessment framework closes at 5pm on 12 June 2026. After that, the regulator will work through the responses — the consultation had received over 1,700 submissions at time of writing — and publish the final framework in summer 2026, ahead of implementation toward the end of the year. For care home managers, that creates a gap of several months between the close of consultation and the point at which inspectors begin using the new framework in practice. That window is worth using deliberately. Evidence built now, under real conditions, will be considerably more convincing than evidence assembled in a hurry once inspectors start visiting.

What the new framework changes

The new adult social care framework replaces the Single Assessment Framework (SAF) introduced in 2024, which the CQC has acknowledged had significant problems. The core structure returns to something care home managers will recognise: the five key questions (Safe, Effective, Caring, Responsive, Well-Led) remain, but the Quality Statements are replaced by 24 Key Lines of Enquiry (KLOEs), and Rating Characteristics return in place of numerical scores.

Two changes in the draft framework are particularly relevant to communications evidence.

Well-Led expands to five KLOEs. Governance, oversight, sustainability, and leadership effectiveness each have their own line of enquiry. A registered manager who can point to a dated, routine record of how telephone communications were monitored and acted on — rather than a retrospective claim — is providing a different class of evidence.

Responsive includes a named KLOE on listening to and responding to feedback. This is new. Previous frameworks referenced feedback in passing; the draft explicitly names it as a line of enquiry. Phone calls are often the primary channel through which families give feedback. A log of when calls came in, whether they were answered, and what happened next is direct evidence for this KLOE.

Why evidence built now is more useful than evidence built later

CQC inspectors do not work only with what a provider tells them on the day of inspection. They consider trends: call records, incident logs, staffing patterns, complaint histories. A home that starts logging call activity from June 2026 and is inspected in November 2026 has five months of continuous, dated evidence to point to. A home that starts in October has six weeks.

The CQC's own guidance consistently emphasises dated, auditable records with named accountability. Evidence that shows management oversight was happening routinely — rather than evidence assembled in response to an inspection notification — is treated as qualitatively different.

What to build during the gap

Establish a routine communications oversight process. If you do not have a systematic way of reviewing which calls your care home received each day, who called, and whether any required follow-up, that is the most useful gap to close. An AI call monitoring service provides this automatically; a manual log can work for smaller homes. The critical factor is regularity and dating — a single log entry covering last Tuesday is less useful than a daily record going back three months.

Create a searchable record of missed and returned calls. The Responsive KLOE on listening and responding to feedback will want to see what you do when someone calls and does not get through. A documented process for returning calls, and evidence that it is followed, is worth more than a policy that says it should happen.

Don't wait for the final framework wording. The broad shape of the new framework is clear from the consultation draft, and the underlying expectation — dated evidence, governance oversight, demonstrated responsiveness — is continuous with what CQC has been moving toward for several years. Providers who are building this evidence base now will not need to retrofit it when the framework goes live.

The practical timeline

Once implementation begins, the new KLOEs are the basis on which your service will be assessed. The Rating Characteristics will tell you what evidence is expected at each rating level; it is worth reviewing those against what you can already demonstrate once they are published.

CareTime's Silent Guard provides a daily Morning Brief and full call log that gives registered managers ongoing evidence of communications oversight — the kind of dated, searchable record that supports Well-Led and Responsive KLOEs. If you'd like to see it running before the new framework goes live, start with a 30-day pilot.