How a home gets flagged.
FirstFlag reads public records and prints what they hold. This page is the whole test: the sources, the three signals, the order homes come back in, how the Well-led floor was worked out, and the parts of the claim we cannot yet stand behind. It is written so you can take any flag we show you, open the home's own CQC page and check us.
Regulatory data: Care Quality Commission, Open Government Licence v3 · Company data: Companies House · Enrichment pass last run 28 July 2026
Counted from the enrichment cache this page is built from, not quoted from memory.
What we read, and what each source can actually tell us.
Five public sources, and nothing else. None of them is a purchased list, a scraped opinion or an inferred contact. Where a record is silent, the product is silent: a field the source does not hold renders as absent rather than as a plausible guess.
One row per registered location, carrying the overall rating, the five domain ratings (Safe, Effective, Caring, Responsive, Well-led) and the date CQC published each one. That is all it carries. No registered manager, no directors, no phone numbers, no bed counts, no inspector commentary and no coordinates. Only one of the 22 values in the register's location-type field means care home; the rest are home-care agencies, GP practices, dentists and similar, and counting those as care homes would overstate a scan by roughly three times.
The location and provider records: the registered manager or the recorded absence of one, beds, address, registration date, service type, specialisms, the full rating history, and under the single assessment framework the percentage score for each key question plus the inspector's own evidence text. Fetched ahead of a partner opening their portal and committed as a file, so the page needs no API key, adds no request latency and cannot be degraded by a CQC outage. The trade is freshness, which is what the refresh cadence below governs.
The published latest ratings download, one row per active location per domain, used for national and regional counts. The data vintage is taken from CQC's own file date rather than from our clock, so re-running the refresh against an unchanged file produces an unchanged page.
Read on the company number CQC itself publishes against the provider, so there is no fuzzy name match and no guessed join. It returns the named directors and their appointment dates, the incorporation date, whether the annual accounts and confirmation statement are filed on time, and any insolvency history. Where CQC's provider name and the name on that company number have drifted apart, the dossier says so rather than picking one.
The only public source that ties an email address to a specific CQC registration. An address is accepted only from the contact panel of a page whose final URL still carries that home's own location id. Addresses are never assembled from a pattern, which is why 278 of the 735 flagged homes carry a published email and the other 457 carry none at all.
A signal is a condition on a published field.
Not a model output, not a sentiment reading, not an opinion about a home. A signal is either true of the public record or it is not, and every one of them can be checked against CQC's own page for that home in about a minute. There are three of them. A home is flagged when it trips at least one, and the sharpest is the only one the register on its own can support:
The overall rating is Good or Outstanding, and Well-led has already been rated Requires improvement or Inadequate.
Leadership is rated down before the headline rating catches up, and the headline is what everybody else is reading. CQC's public directory filters on the overall rating, so this combination cannot be searched for on the regulator's own site. A patch derived live from the register is built on that test alone, so every home in one carries it. The enrichment pass then adds the other two codes where the record supports them: the first stands as a signal in its own right, the second only ever sharpens a home that is already flagged.
Manager gone
CQC records no registered manager against the home's regulated activity: the post is unfilled and the operator is trading without one. It appears nowhere on the home's public CQC page. True of 92 of the 735 flagged homes held today.
Well-led cracking
The test above: the overall rating still reads Good or Outstanding while Well-led has already been rated Requires improvement or Inadequate. The sharpest signal the register alone can support, and the one every home in a register-built patch carries.
Long since inspected
Six years or more since a published inspection on a home still rated Good or Outstanding. On its own this is the CQC backlog rather than a signal: the median gap for a Good or Outstanding care home, measured across the scan, is 59 months. P3 ranks a flagged home. It never flags one.
Signals overlap. One home can carry all three, so the counts do not sum to the number of flagged homes.
What the score is, and why the portal does not lead with it.
Every flagged home carries a score from 0 to 99, computed from register fields only. It is deterministic: the same record produces the same number on every render, with no random element and no weighting learned from data we do not have.
The score is a ranking aid, not a headline, and it is not a probability of anything. On register fields alone a large part of any patch scores identically, and a column of repeated numbers would claim a precision the data does not have. So the portal sorts on the date CQC published the Well-led rating and shows that date in place of a score. Ties fall to the score, then to the staler inspection, then to the CQC location id, which is why two renders of the same patch come back in the same order.
Where the Good line actually falls.
CQC scores each key question out of 100 and publishes the score and the rating. It has never published the boundary between them. An operator reading its own report cannot tell whether it missed Good by two points or by twenty, which is the first thing anyone being sold a turnaround wants to know.
The boundary is partly recoverable by reading back across every scored Well-led judgement in the cache. There are 185 of them, 13 rated Good or Outstanding. The lowest score CQC has rated Good is 68. Requires improvement reaches 68 as well. The two ranges meet at one point rather than splitting cleanly, so 68 is a score CQC has called both ways.
No Well-led score below 68 in this sample has been rated Good. For an operator sitting under that line, the distance to it is the size of the job stated in CQC's own units, and it is a number the operator does not otherwise have.
68 is not a pass mark and we do not present it as one. It is CQC's observed behaviour across 13 Good judgements, which is a small sample, and one drawn only from homes that already tripped the flag rather than from the sector at large. CQC has not confirmed a threshold and may not work to a fixed one. The band re-derives itself every time the enrichment pass runs, so the first Good awarded below 68 moves the number on this page without anyone editing it. The dossier only uses the floor where the sample holds at least eight Good judgements.
How often this moves, and what is stale on purpose.
The register is re-scanned weekly. A patch is stamped with the date of the last successful ingest run and never with the clock, so the figures on a portal are dated to the day they were true rather than to the moment you loaded the page.
The deep enrichment pass, which is what supplies managers, directors, filing status, inspector evidence and contact routes, runs separately and is committed as a file. It last ran on 28 July 2026. That is a deliberate trade: no API key in production, no request latency on a partner's page and no dependency on CQC being up at the moment a prospect opens a link, in exchange for the enrichment being exactly as old as the last pass.
New flags appear as they trip. A home whose Well-led rating was published in the last 24 months is counted separately as the live end of the pool, because a home working through a finding from last spring is a different conversation from one marked down years ago and never revisited.
What this cannot tell you.
The strongest thing we can do on a page like this is be exact about where the method stops. Every item below is a real constraint, not a disclaimer.
We cannot show you a hit rate.
FirstFlag has no customers and no track record. We have not measured how many flagged homes went on to be downgraded, so there is no accuracy rate, no validation study and no customer result anywhere on this site. Everything above describes the test. None of it is evidence about the outcome. When there is a measured figure, it will appear here.
A flag is not a prediction that a home will fail.
It says a published record shows a defined condition now. Homes recover, operators fix things, and some flagged homes will be rated Good at the next assessment. What the flag buys you is the order you find out in.
Public records lag reality.
A rating is published some time after the visit that produced it. A registered manager can be appointed the day after we read the register. Nothing here is real time, and nothing here should be treated as certainly current on the morning you pick up the phone.
We date a finding only where CQC dates it.
There is a date field on an assessment record and it is not the date of the visit. Measured across the 43 assessments that publish both, it sits anywhere from 17 days after the assessment window opens to 125 days before it, median 16 days before, with no stable offset. So where CQC prints the assessment window in its own report we carry that window word for word, and where it does not, the finding carries no date at all.
A missing field stays missing.
If the record holds no manager, no director and no email, the product prints nothing in that space. Absence in a dossier means absence in the public record, not absence in the world, and a register-derived patch carries ratings and dates only.
England only.
The register we read is CQC's, which covers England across 9 regions. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own regulators and are out of scope.
Decision support, not advice.
Signals are derived from public records that can lag reality, and we do not warrant that any flagged home will fail, improve or engage you. That sentence is also in the terms, and it is the same claim this page makes.
Every dossier links back to the record it was built from.
Each one carries a link to that home's own page on cqc.org.uk. Open it, read the domain ratings and the publication dates, and compare them to what we printed. If the register says something we did not, the register is right and we want to hear about it.
A territory patch is £395 to build and £79 a month to keep watched, one firm per CQC region.