Under the changes only leadership will be rated at trust level. Services and hospital locations will still be rated for all key questions as well as overall.

The changes were originally proposed in the CQC's 2020 consultation on delivering more flexible, responsive regulation.

The consultation stated: ‘We propose to simplify ratings for NHS trusts by publishing a single rating at the overall trust level, rather than multiple levels of complex, aggregated ratings. This will enable us to focus on the culture and leadership of an organisation, as well as the services where people receive care.

‘This single rating will be based on our overall assessment of the organisation's performance against the well-led key question, including findings from service-level assessments. We'll continue to develop our approach to assessing the well-led key question at trust level to make sure that we look at the overall organisational performance on quality and safety effectively as part of that assessment.

‘Once we implement this approach, we will no longer publish separate trust-level ratings for the safe, effective, caring and responsive key questions. We will continue to publish those ratings at service and location level. This will provide a clear view of the quality of those services at the level that is relevant to people who use the service.'