Ms Carol Grogan:

I thank the Deputy for her questions. Regarding residents having access to their own money, this is a fundamental right. A huge amount of progress has been made since we started regulating in this area. We have seen that some providers have supported residents to be able to control and spend their money as they see fit, while other providers have been slower. It is a key focus of our rights-based approach, no more than any other right we look at such as privacy, the right to one's own space, and the right to live in a safe environment. The right to have control over your own possessions including your money is a key right.

I will talk generally and then comment on the actions we can take in cases when providers are not meeting the required standards. The decision-making capacity legislation will really support residents in this regard across the board in terms of upholding their rights and ensuring a lack of capacity is not presumed - or not presumed on a constant basis - and is continually reviewed. Understanding the will and preference of people has to be understood and taken onboard where there is a lack of capacity. It is essential that legislation is commenced as soon as possible. A key area here is the lack of safeguarding legislation. While there are regulations around safeguarding, they do not go far enough to protect vulnerable adults. The safeguarding legislation will work very nicely alongside the regulations to further safeguard residents with regard to control over their own possessions, their choices and their will and preference.

We have called out certain examples where providers have failed to uphold the correct standard or move beyond the basic requirements, including cases in which a child did not have a school place or residents did not have access to health services. In such cases, we assess the risk and the impact to residents and we require the provider to submit a compliance plan setting out how they will address the issue. In some cases, we direct the provider on the day of the inspection if the impact is sufficiently significant. We call that an urgent compliance plan. If we believe the risk is significant, we set the timeframe by which the provider must comply. We then monitor that and may go back out to inspect or require the provider to submit an update on their progress against those action plans. I will ask Mr. Colfer to give more detail on this. If we find it is a trend of a provider in a number of centres, that provider will be brought in and we will talk to it about the areas cropping up across its services.

As the Deputy quite rightly pointed out, there is a higher prevalence of non-compliance in congregated settings. We have outlined in this report, and in previous reports, the importance of transitioning people to community-based settings. The ethos of care and support has to change in that move to community-based settings. There has to be a different approach to the supports so it is more community-based and more inclusive, and the residents are involved in the decisions. There are examples in the report we published on Tuesday where residents identified providers which have a much more inclusive way of running a service and residents are part and parcel of it, and other providers which are not quite there yet. That will be a focus for us going forward.

Residents' rights, the residents' positive behaviour support and healthcare are all key aspects of every inspection we do and we look across these aspects across the board. None can be looked at in isolation because one regulation will always impact on another. As Ms McShane outlined earlier, non-compliance with premises will have a huge impact on the rights and privacy of residents.

I ask Mr. Colfer to highlight what actions we take at a provider level from a quality improvement perspective but also where providers are not meeting the required standards.