Devon care providers are now sitting between two enforcement streams that have arrived at the same time. CQC has been running its new single assessment framework since the 2023 to 2024 rollout and it is in steady use across the region. The Fair Work Agency began operating on 7 April 2026 and has named adult social care as a priority sector. This guide sets out what each one will look at and what to have ready.
Quick answer: CQC will check the physical evidence that residents are safe, PAT, water, fire, infection control and medicines, while the Fair Work Agency will check payroll, sleep-in pay, right to work and holiday pay. Both inspectors expect to see dated written records, not verbal assurance.
Two regulators, one care home, one set of records
A Devon care home in 2026 is regulated under two parallel frameworks. The first is the Health and Social Care Act 2008 with its 2014 Regulated Activities Regulations, enforced by CQC. The second is the cluster of employment law that the Fair Work Agency now polices in one place, the National Minimum Wage Act 1998 and the 2015 NMW Regulations, the holiday pay rules under the Working Time Regulations 1998, and right to work duties under section 15 of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006. The Employment Rights Act 2025, Schedule 7, created the agency itself and gave it the consolidated powers it now uses.
In practice the two regulators do not coordinate, but they both expect the provider to hold the same kind of thing: dated written evidence that the work has been done, by a competent person, against the relevant standard. The home that already keeps that evidence in good order will navigate both without much drama. The home that runs on memory and goodwill is exposed twice over.
The five CQC key questions and where compliance lives
CQC assesses every service against five key questions: Safe, Effective, Caring, Responsive and Well-led. Each one has a set of quality statements behind it. This article focuses on the operational evidence that sits underneath Safe, because that is the area where physical compliance records, electrical, water, fire, infection prevention, medicines, are most directly examined. The other four key questions matter, but they pull on care planning, leadership and culture rather than on the testing and monitoring evidence base.
The Safe key question is the one most often flagged in published Devon inspection reports, and the one that is easiest to fix in advance. The fixes are unglamorous. They involve folders, dates, signatures and a calendar of recurring tasks. Done properly they also reduce the chance of an actual incident, which is the point.
PAT testing and electrical safety in a care setting
Portable appliance testing is not a legal requirement in itself, but the duty in the Electricity at Work Regulations 1989 to maintain electrical equipment in a safe condition is. For a care home, PAT is the most practical way to evidence that duty across kettles, chargers, hoists, mobile aids, fans, lamps and the dozens of resident-owned items that come and go. CQC will want to see a current asset register with test dates and pass status, particularly for any equipment used in resident rooms or in clinical care.
Two patterns surface in Devon homes again and again. The first is a PAT certificate that ran out 14 months ago because the electrician retired and nobody booked a replacement. The second is a register that covers the home's own equipment but ignores everything brought in by residents or family, which is precisely the category most likely to fail. A pre-assessment will pick up both.
Water safety, Legionella control and scalding prevention
Care homes fall squarely inside HSE Approved Code of Practice L8 on Legionella control. The provider must hold a current written legionella risk assessment produced by a competent specialist, and must then carry out the monitoring tasks that flow from it: monthly outlet temperatures, sentinel point checks, stored water temperatures and remedial action where readings fall outside the expected range. Cold should stay below 20 degrees, hot at the outlet should reach 50 degrees within a minute, and stored hot water should sit at 60 degrees or above.
Scalding control runs alongside Legionella control and pulls in the opposite direction. Vulnerable residents must not be exposed to water hot enough to scald, which is why thermostatic mixing valves are fitted to baths, showers and basins used by residents. The valves need annual servicing, with thermal disinfection checks quarterly, and a record of each. CQC inspectors in Devon have flagged TMV service gaps in published reports more than once. Our water safety and temperature monitoring service handles the routine monitoring side of this. A qualified legionella assessor handles the underlying risk assessment, and we will point you to one if you do not already have one.
Fire safety in residential care
The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 places the duty on the person in charge of fire safety here, usually the registered provider or registered manager, to carry out and record a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment. For a residential care home with sleeping occupancy that assessment is more demanding than for a typical office. The home must have current fire door records, a working evacuation plan that accounts for residents with limited mobility, personal emergency evacuation plans where appropriate, working emergency lighting, signage, alarm and detection systems on a service contract, and staff who have practised an evacuation drill in the last year.
CQC will ask to see the assessment and the action plan from it. A fire and rescue service audit, which can run alongside, will dig further into doors, compartmentation and means of escape. Our fire safety service produces the written assessment, the fire door register and the evacuation plan in one visit, with FDIS-style criteria applied to every door.
Infection prevention, control and medicines management
Infection prevention and control is now a permanent feature of CQC inspection rather than a pandemic-era add-on. The home needs a current IPC policy, evidence that it is being followed, hand hygiene audits, cleaning schedules with sign-off, an outbreak plan and PPE stock that has not expired. Linen, waste and laundry processes are checked. Staff training records on IPC are checked. None of this is exotic, but it has to be in writing and dated.
Medicines management is the single area most likely to produce a regulatory breach in adult social care. The law requires safe storage, accurate administration, controlled drug procedures where applicable, an audit trail of stock, signed MAR charts, and a complaint and incident process when something goes wrong. Temperature monitoring of medicine fridges is in scope. So is the management of homely remedies and end-of-life anticipatory medicines. Most providers get the basics right and trip on a procedural detail, a missed signature, a stock count that does not reconcile, a controlled drug register with a gap on a Sunday night. The remedy is internal audit, monthly, with the manager signing the audit log.
The Fair Work Agency and adult social care
The Fair Work Agency launched on 7 April 2026 with consolidated powers that used to sit across three bodies, HMRC's National Minimum Wage team, the Employment Agency Standards Inspectorate, and the Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority. It has named adult social care as a priority sector for first-year enforcement, on the basis of years of HMRC NMW underpayment data showing the sector at or near the top of the league table. For Devon, where care is one of the largest employment sectors, this matters.
An inspector can ask for six years of payroll, every employment contract, holiday pay calculations, working time records including sleep-in logs, every right to work file, and any deductions taken from pay. Where breaches are found the agency can issue a Notice of Underpayment, apply a penalty of up to 200 percent of the underpayment, name the provider publicly, and refer the most serious cases for criminal prosecution. Our Fair Work Agency pre-assessment mirrors that inspection, in advance, so you find the gaps first.
Sleep-in pay after Mencap and the April 2026 NLW
In Royal Mencap Society v Tomlinson-Blake [2021] UKSC 8 the Supreme Court held that only the hours a sleep-in worker is awake and working count toward National Minimum Wage. Time asleep does not. Sector practice settled around a fixed sleep-in allowance for the night, with a top-up at the NMW rate for any time spent up providing care. The principle is now well established, but in practice the records often do not match the principle.
From April 2026 the National Living Wage for staff aged 21 and over is 12.71 pounds per hour. That is the rate that must be paid for every hour a sleep-in worker is on their feet during a shift. Take the example of a Devon care home running eight sleep-in shifts a week with established staff. If the home was set up before 2021, or if it has high turnover, the sleep-in framework may still rest on legacy assumptions. The records may show a flat sleep-in payment with no log of waking time. An FWA inspector will reverse-engineer the calculation and look for any pay reference period where the worker effectively dropped below NMW. The fix is straightforward, a sleep-in log and a payroll process that tops up waking hours, but it needs to be in place before a visit, not promised at one.
Holiday pay for zero-hours and bank staff
Many Devon care homes rely on bank and zero-hours staff to flex around resident need. The Supreme Court in Harpur Trust v Brazel [2022] UKSC 21 held that holiday pay for workers with irregular hours must be calculated using a 52-week reference period averaging actual earnings, not the rule-of-thumb 12.07 percent of hours worked that providers had previously used. The 12.07 percent shortcut is non-compliant for irregular workers and remains a common finding in employment compliance audits.
The Government has since introduced separate rules for part-year and irregular hours workers using rolled-up holiday pay, but the underlying principle stands. If your payroll software still applies 12.07 percent to a worker who genuinely has irregular hours and is not on the new rolled-up route, you are likely under-paying holiday and have been since 2022. The Fair Work Agency knows this is a common gap and will check.
Sponsored workers and the right to work follow-up
Adult social care has been one of the largest users of the Skilled Worker visa route for sponsored workers in the past three years. Sponsorship comes with active duties on the employer, including a duty to verify ongoing right to work and to keep records that satisfy the Home Office's prevention of illegal working guidance. Section 15 of the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006 sets the civil penalty regime for failures to carry out the right to work check properly.
A pattern that emerged across 2024 and 2025 was sponsor licences being revoked from care providers because the follow-up check before a Certificate of Sponsorship expiry had been missed, or because the share code record had not been retained. Once the licence is gone the workers cannot lawfully continue and the home loses its staff almost overnight. The remedy is a system: a calendar of every sponsored worker's expiry date, a fresh share code check before each one, the result printed and filed, and a second person signing the file. Built once, this takes ten minutes per worker per year.
DSPT, GDPR and the informal use of AI tools
The Data Security and Protection Toolkit is the NHS self-assessment that adult social care providers in England complete annually. Since 2024, CQC has treated annual DSPT submission as a baseline expectation for any service handling personal and medical data. The toolkit covers staff training on data protection, access controls, incident response, data sharing agreements and supplier assurance. A home that has never submitted, or that submitted once and let it lapse, will struggle to evidence the well-led key question on information governance.
A related issue has emerged with the informal use of generative AI tools by care staff. Transcribing handover notes through a free phone app. Drafting a difficult email to a family with an AI assistant. Asking a chatbot to summarise a care plan. The intent is usually benign, but the data going through these tools is special category personal data under GDPR, and the route that data takes is often not understood. Every care provider should now have a written AI usage policy that defines what is allowed, what is prohibited, which tools are sanctioned and what training staff have had. The policy does not need to be long, but it needs to exist.
Devon Care Homes Collaborative and peer support
The Devon Care Homes Collaborative is a useful peer resource for providers across the county. It runs networking, training and information sharing that smaller homes cannot easily produce on their own. It is not a regulator, it does not provide audit, and it cannot stand in front of CQC or the Fair Work Agency on your behalf, but it is a strong source of sector knowledge and contact with other registered managers. A provider that is isolated, geographically or operationally, has more to gain from collaborative membership than one already plugged into a group structure.
Why local matters and what TestSafe brings
There is currently no Devon-based productised compliance consultancy specialising in adult social care. There are national HR and compliance firms that cover the sector, and there are local generalists, but the combination of fixed-price, locally delivered, sector-aware compliance work is thin. That is part of the reason TestSafe Compliance was set up. The founders' background is in adult social care operations, not in selling annual retainers from a London address.
A TestSafe pre-assessment for a Devon care home covers the operational evidence base that sits underneath both regulators: electrical, water and fire records on one side, payroll, contracts, holiday pay, sleep-in logs and right to work files on the other. It is a check, not a regulator, and it is not regulated legal advice. Where something needs a solicitor or a qualified specialist, we say so plainly and point you to one. Where something can be fixed by you tomorrow, we tell you that too.
This article is for general information only and reflects the law as it stood on the date of publication. It does not constitute legal advice and should not be relied upon as a substitute for advice specific to your situation. TestSafe Compliance provides audit and assessment services only. Where a specific legal question arises, seek advice from a qualified solicitor or employment law specialist.
Frequently asked questions
What does CQC look at under the Safe key question in a Devon care home?
Under the Safe key question, CQC looks at the physical and operational evidence that residents are protected from avoidable harm. That includes PAT testing records for portable electrical equipment, water temperature logs and TMV servicing for scalding and Legionella control, the current fire risk assessment with fire door checks, infection prevention and control records, and medication storage, administration and audit. The provider must hold dated evidence on file. A confident verbal answer from the manager is not enough on its own, because inspectors record what they can see and verify, and that means paper, dates and signatures.
How does the Fair Work Agency affect Devon care providers in 2026?
The Fair Work Agency launched on 7 April 2026 and has named adult social care as a priority sector for first-year enforcement. Inspectors can request six years of payroll, contracts, holiday pay calculations, sleep-in records and right to work files in a single visit. Penalties go up to 200 percent of the underpayment with public naming, and serious cases can be prosecuted. For Devon care homes with sleep-in staff, sponsored workers or zero-hours contracts, the exposure is real and the records need to be ready before an inspector arrives, not assembled in a panic on the day of the visit.
Do I have to pay the full National Living Wage for sleep-in shifts in a care home?
Following Royal Mencap Society v Tomlinson-Blake [2021] UKSC 8, only the hours a worker is awake and working count toward the National Minimum Wage. Time asleep on a sleep-in shift does not. However, a contractual sleep-in allowance must still be paid, and the moment the worker is roused to provide care those hours must be paid at no less than the April 2026 rate of 12.71 pounds per hour for staff aged 21 and over. The records have to show this distinction clearly, with a sleep-in log of waking time and a payroll process that tops up the waking hours so no pay reference period falls below NMW.
What is the DSPT and do I need to submit one as a Devon care provider?
The Data Security and Protection Toolkit is the NHS self-assessment that adult social care providers in England are expected to complete each year. Since 2024, CQC has treated annual DSPT submission as a baseline expectation for providers handling personal and medical data. The toolkit covers staff training, access controls, incident response, data sharing and supplier assurance. A care home that has never submitted one will be visible to CQC and will struggle to evidence the well-led key question on information governance. The submission itself is free and the work involved is mostly about gathering things you already have.
Can I get local compliance support for my Devon care home rather than a London corporate retainer?
Yes, although the market is thin. There is currently no other Devon-based productised compliance consultancy specialising in adult social care, which is part of the reason TestSafe Compliance was set up. National HR and compliance firms cover the sector but tend to work on annual retainers priced for larger groups. A locally based service can visit your home, walk your records with you, and meet your registered manager face to face without a long drive or a corporate account manager in the middle. Fixed-price work, written records, no surprises after the visit.