First to know.
First to call.
FirstFlag screens 9,062 CQC locations across London and the West Midlands, 2,724 of them registered care homes, and holds 170 flagged care homes right now: registered manager gone, Well-led rated down while the overall rating still stands, six years or more since the last published inspection. Each flag arrives with the operating company's directors named, the home's switchboard, and a published email where one exists.
CQC rates five key questions and aggregates them into the single overall rating. Its published principle: the overall normally stays Good only while no key question is Inadequate and no more than one is Requires improvement, and normally drops at two. A home flagged on Well-led has already spent that one. The overall still reads Good, and what stands between it and the drop is the distance between two numbers printed on the same CQC page.
We also ran the Well-led test backwards over four years of CQC's own ratings files, 14,583 English care homes. 13.2% of the flagged homes lost their overall rating by July 2026, against 9% of the homes whose Well-led was rated Good or Outstanding. About one in eight rather than one in eleven.
Seven in eight flagged homes did not fall. This is a shorter list to work, not a list of homes going under, and anyone who opens a call as though it were the second thing will be corrected by the person who answers.
Figures from the FirstFlag scan of 11 July 2026. Data: Care Quality Commission (OGL v3) and Companies House.
Pick your region. See what the scan holds.
The scan covers London and the West Midlands. Open either one for the real flagged homes with identity withheld, and two complete sample dossiers showing exactly what a licensed patch receives. The other 7 regions have not been built yet, and their pages say so rather than show you a zero.
The record moves before the rating does. That gap is the window.
By the time a home is rated Inadequate it is on cqc.org.uk for every consultancy in the country to see, and 15 homes sit on that list in this scan. The 170 homes below are different: still standing, already marked down underneath, and invisible to anyone reading the headline rating. The search box on cqc.org.uk will not return them. CQC's monthly directory file will, if you download it and do the join yourself. In the four-year backtest, most homes in this position stayed Good: about one in eight lost the rating, against one in eleven of the homes whose Well-led was Good or Outstanding, and that difference is what the list is for.
Manager gone
CQC records nobody in the registered manager role against the home's regulated activity. Where a provider is required to have one, running without it sits against a condition of their registration, so it is a live problem with a deadline attached rather than a matter of opinion. The home's own CQC page shows it only as a missing line. The search box on cqc.org.uk has no filter for it, but CQC's monthly directory file carries the column, so the list itself is free to rebuild.
Well-led cracking
The Well-led domain has been rated Requires improvement or Inadequate while the overall rating still reads Good or Outstanding. Over four years, 13.2% of the homes in that position lost the overall rating, against 9% of homes whose Well-led was rated Good or Outstanding. CQC publishes both marks on the home's own page and in its monthly ratings file, so the bare list is free to rebuild in an afternoon. What neither will tell you is how long Well-led has been down, or who to call about it.
Long since inspected
Six years or more since CQC published an inspection of a home it still rates Good or Outstanding. There is no CQC deadline to be past: assessment is risk-based, so this is elapsed time rather than a missed obligation. What it means commercially is that the judgement anyone looking the home up reads today was made a very long time ago.
Signals overlap: one home can trip more than one, so these counts add up to more than the 170 flagged homes. How a home gets flagged · What the four-year backtest measured
Three steps. You only do the third.
We scan your territory
Every registered care home in your patch, checked against CQC registration and inspection data from the published register. Manager departures, domain slips, inspection drift.
You get the flags
Each flagged home arrives scored and explained, with the operating company's directors named from Companies House records, the operator switchboard and registered manager as CQC publishes them, and a published email where the home has one.
You call first
You are talking to the decision-maker while the rating still stands. That is a different conversation from the one that starts after a rating has fallen. First conversation, best position.
One real home from the current scan.
Identity withheld here. Licensed territories see the name, the directors and the switchboard on every flag.
- Well-led rated Requires improvement, published November 2024, while the overall rating still reads Good
Built once.
Refreshed as the register updates.
Priced per territory · quoted before you commit
The build happens once: every flagged home in your patch found, researched and written up. The monthly keeps it refreshed as the CQC register updates. A territory is drawn round the area your firm actually covers, and we price it once we know the shape of it. The edge is being first to the conversation and knowing what to do with it.
Just want one home? Ask for a single dossier. A dossier buys the dossier, never the patch. Licence the patch and its homes come off single sale, with anything you have already bought credited.
- Every flagged home in your territory, fully identified
- Named directors from Companies House on every flag
- Switchboard looked up, plus a published email where the home has one
- Refreshed as the CQC register updates, new flags as they trip
- Cancel any month, no minimum term
The Inadequate list is public. This one comes with a number.
One in eight of the flagged homes lost its CQC rating inside four years, against one in eleven of the homes whose Well-led was rated Good or Outstanding. FirstFlag is built and run by a lead generation team working with the UK care sector. Territories are allocated in order of request.
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