What Policies You Need for CQC Registration: The Full List
CQC now closes incomplete applications outright. Here is every policy and document you need to submit before you apply for registration as a care provider in England.
By HeroDocs Team
CQC registration turns on your policies, and two recent changes have made that harder than it used to be. One of them can end your application on the day you send it.
Why the Rules Changed
From July 2025, CQC updated what it asks for at registration, dropping some documents altogether, including ICO registration certificates and formal statements of financial viability. That sounds like less work, and it is not, because the bar rose for everything that remains.
From February 2026, CQC began returning or closing applications that arrive incomplete or inaccurate. A missing document used to start a conversation with the registration team; now it ends the application, and you begin again from scratch.
The Policies CQC Registration Requires You to Submit
CQC asks you to upload policies in six core areas, none of them optional, because these are how it judges whether your service is safe and well-led enough to be registered at all.
Policy Area | What It Must Cover |
|---|---|
Governance | How you oversee your service, monitor quality, and act on concerns |
Safeguarding | How you protect people from abuse or neglect, and how you respond when something goes wrong |
Medication | How you manage administering, recording, storing, and handling medicines safely |
Infection control | How you prevent and manage the spread of infection |
Equality, diversity and human rights | How you ensure fair and inclusive care for everyone you support |
Complaints | How complaints are received, investigated, and resolved fairly |
Each policy must describe your service. CQC says plainly that generic templates, downloaded and submitted unchanged, get spotted and do not pass. Your policies need to:
Name your service
Describe how your procedures work in practice
Match your service model and the people you support
Our full policy lists are here: care home policies and procedures and domiciliary care policies.
What Else You Need Beyond the Core Policies
Policies are only part of the submission, and several other documents go in alongside them.
Statement of Purpose
This is a public document, written for CQC and for the people you will support, setting out what your service does and where. It must include:
The regulated activities you will provide
The age range and types of need you cover
The area you work in
CQC uses it to judge whether your service is clearly defined. Our statement of purpose guide covers what goes in each section.
Training Plan
This is not a training matrix. It must explain:
How your team is inducted
What ongoing training you provide
How you meet specialist training needs
How you support overseas workers
Which training provider you use
A matrix records what training has already happened, whereas a plan explains how training works in your service, and that distinction is what CQC is testing.
Service User Guide
Written for the person receiving care rather than for the regulator, it explains your pricing, safeguarding and complaints without jargon.
Insurance Certificates
You need current certificates for four things:
Employers liability
Public liability
Professional indemnity
Buildings and contents
Each must cover the activities you will provide.
Proof of Local Need (new from July 2025)
If you plan to take local authority funded clients, a form for providers of personal care asks you to show there is local need for the service, which exists to slow registrations in areas already well served.
The Assessment Framework Behind Your Application
CQC has moved on from Key Lines of Enquiry. The Single Assessment Framework looks at five areas:
Safety
Effectiveness
Responsiveness
Care and kindness
Leadership
Your policies sit underneath that framework, and whether someone reviews your application on paper or visits months later, they are looking for the same thing: does the policy match the care being delivered.
A safeguarding policy that does not describe your real process will not hold up. Neither will a medication policy untouched since the day you opened.
The framework leans hard on governance and leadership. How you oversee the service, respond to incidents and act on feedback all show up in the quality of your policies.
The Most Common Reason Applications Fail
It is rarely that a provider has no policies. It is that the policies do not describe that provider.
Picture a home care agency sending in a safeguarding policy written for a care home. It reads well. It routes concerns through an on-site manager, covers night staffing, and watches the communal areas. It says nothing about a lone worker in someone's kitchen at 8am. CQC will notice.
Medication policies fail the same way. A home care policy has to answer things a care home never faces:
What happens when the client is out at medication time
How you handle over-the-counter medicines a client asks for
The two settings run differently. Your policies have to run differently too. We compare them side by side in domiciliary care policies vs residential care policies.
Staying Compliant After Registration
Registration is the start of the job, not the end.
Your policies have to keep up as:
Guidance changes
Your service changes
CQC changes its framework
A policy written for registration and untouched for two years is a liability. Inspectors ask staff where the policies live and when they were last reviewed.
So you need a system that:
Tells you when a policy is due for review
Gets new staff to read the right documents
Keeps a record of who has read what
Most providers start with a folder. Then version control bites: printed copies, emailed versions, and a shared drive nobody quite trusts. Setting up properly early is cheaper than fixing it later.
HeroDocs does all four parts in one place: writing, storing, reviewing, and tracking who has signed. Find out more at herodocs.co.
Sources
Last checked: 28 September 2026.
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