A judicial review challenge by mental health provider Cygnet Health Care against the Care Quality Commission has ruled in favour of Cygnet.

Cygnet challenged the legality of the CQC’s inspection reports and enforcement action taken by the CQC against various Cygnet sites on the basis of apparent bias resulting from an inspector’s historic connection to Cygnet’s hospitals. It was also found during the litigation that the CQC had not been properly applying its own conflicts of interest policy on a systemic level, including in this case. This was contrary to what the CQC had said previously.

The case ran for over a year with the final hearing on 4-5 December.

Cygnet’s application for judicial review was allowed with the judge declaring that the inspector was “apparently biased”. The CQC’s decision that its “impugned decisions” were not affected by apparent bias was therefore unlawful, and that a number of reports, decisions and/or actions taken by the CQC were affected by the apparent bias of the inspector

The judge commented on the CQC’s failure to follow its conflicts policy: “The conflicts policy was not followed in full. The potential for conflict arising from the use of a service by an inspector was one which CQC identified and thought about. It was of such obvious relevance that the decision to allow inspection by a former service-user was to be taken at a senior level, but it was not. It is the role of those in senior leadership to deploy long experience, overview and insight which might not be evident to those who do not have that level of responsibility. For those who should have referred the matter to senior leadership to have failed to do so is indicative of the conflicts policy not being taken as seriously as it should have been. Equally, the failure of senior leaders to ask and check whether the correct decision-making process was being implemented also indicates that senior leadership was not taking sufficient interest in potential conflicts. For an organisation which is entirely focused on assessing compliance with methods, procedures and policies, these are striking features of the case.”

The judge also found that the CQC had failed to follow its own conflicts policy in this and other cases – as the CQC had belatedly admitted during the proceedings.

The full judgement of Cygnet Health Care v Care Quality Commission can be read here.