The Health and Social Care Act 2008 (regulated activities) regulations 2014: a litany of fundamental flaws?

In this paper, I argue that the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014 are fatally flawed. This is a criticism more often levied at knee-jerk responses to policy crises, precisely because they are created without the benefit of time and thought. Yet, far from being a knee-jerk response, these Regulations were the product of considerable thought and deliberation following a sensitively executed public inquiry. Notwithstanding the apparent rigour of the process which produced them, I argue that the 2014 Regulations will fail, because they rely too heavily on the rhetoric of criminal law while failing to take into account the competing norms for compliance and the impact of NHS budget constraints. Further, they push the CQC towards a heavy-handed deterrence approach to enforcement, which will increase hostility between regulatees and the inspectorate, and ultimately reduce the scope for developing the transparency about failures which is sorely needed in the NHS. This paper challenges the contemporary wisdom that it is primarily knee-jerk regulatory responses that suffer from fatal flaws of this nature