A CQC rating tells you about the quality of care in a home today. It says nothing about whether the company running that home will still exist in two years. Only one of those two questions gets checked by the regulator, which is exactly why we check the other one ourselves, for every home in our network. This is a first look at what that turns up across our Leeds database, using aggregated, anonymised figures only. No home is named or identifiable in any of the numbers below.

WHAT WE FOUND

Our database currently covers 82 care homes across Leeds. Before drawing any conclusions from it, we discard any Companies House match we can't confidently verify as the actual operating company: a similarly named but unrelated business, a company registered in a different city, or a charity number our automated check couldn't resolve. That filtering removed 35 of the 82 homes. We'd rather work from a smaller number we trust than a larger one we don't. Of the 47 homes that passed that check, roughly 3 in 10 carried an adverse company status at the point we checked: dissolved, in liquidation, or removed from the register entirely. Three of those homes held a Good CQC rating at their most recent inspection. To a family searching by CQC rating alone, each would have looked like a safe, well-run choice, right up until the business behind it stopped existing.

A SIGNAL WORTH NAMING CAREFULLY

A separate group of homes, about 4 in 10 of the reliably matched 47, were still active and trading, but carried one or more registered charges (similar to a mortgage) against the operating company. We want to be precise here rather than alarmist: a single registered charge is unremarkable for any business that owns its own property, and isn't on its own a sign of trouble. It's a meaningful signal only where it accumulates, and a small number of homes in our data carried three or more, and even then it should prompt a closer look, not a conclusion.

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR A FAMILY CHOOSING A CARE HOME

A CQC rating and a company's solvency are separate questions, and a family has no easy way to check the second one themselves. By the time it becomes visible, a sudden closure or an unplanned move, there's no time left to act on it. This is why every home in Merydian's network is checked against both, on an ongoing basis rather than once, before it's ever recommended to a family.

This is a working snapshot from our own Leeds provider database, not a scientific study, drawn from 47 confirmed matches at a single point in time. We'll revisit and republish these figures as our network grows.