Cash for chaos
Care Quality Commission , Issue 1643 TREBLES all round for the chief architects of the evisceration of the Care Quality Commission as they continue to drink from the eternal cup of public funding, months after fleeing the chaos of their own making.

Between them, former chief executive Ian Trenholm, his interim who quickly exited, Kate Terroni, executive director of operations Tyson Hepple and chief digital and data officer Mark Sutton oversaw one of the most catastrophic administrations in public service history.

Not only did the shiny new IT system brought in by tech-obsessed Trenholm not work (Eyes passim), it also gobbled up hundreds of reports that can't be retrieved. On top of that, a new "framework", which tried to shortcut the way inspections were carried out, was so shoddy it has resulted in ratings being written off as unreliable or even fabricated, and an exodus of experienced inspectors.

Backlog blitz
Staff are now fighting to get on top of a huge backlog of inspections – some hospitals and GP surgeries have not been visited for a decade; and another 5,000 "reports of concern" about health and social providers going back to August that have not been processed. They include "major" causes for concern flagged by staff and members of the public. The largely inexperienced staff are getting through inspections at a sixth of the pre-Covid rate.

Health secretary Wes Streeting described the organisation as "rotting", while incoming chief executive Sir Julian Hartley said he was shocked by what he found, declaring the system a "complete failure in terms of what it set out to achieve". The balls-up is reported to have cost £110m and counting – almost three times the £40m allocated annually to the regulator.

Leaving gifts
Luckily for the gang of four, the board decided to ignore Streeting's dictum to stop rewarding NHS failure and, er, rewarded failure, handsomely.

CQC policy states that early termination under redundancy policy includes six months' notice. But their contracts were not terminated early – they were all allowed to resign, ensuring they could leave with unblemished records. So why were they all given six months' extra pay, adding up to at least £400,000?

"As individual employment terms are confidential we cannot go into specifics," we were told.

Mayday!
For Trenholm, who had previously abandoned failed multimillion-pound IT projects at the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs and the NHS Blood and Transplant Service just before the shit hit their fans, this added £120,000 on top of his £1.7m pension pot, accrued over just six years. He left with just four days' notice last May as the wheels started to fall off his ill-fated experiment.

Terroni oversaw the mess in adult social care and the CQC's transformation programme before briefly stepping up to serve as interim chief executive after Trenholm's departure. She apologised publicly for organisational failings last July – then bailed in October.

She continues to collect her £210,000 salary and pension while completing a professional certificate in executive coaching at Henley Business School.

Hepple, whose salary and pension package was £200,000 in 2022-23, was instrumental in the CQC's transformation initiatives. Sutton is still drawing his £180,000 salary for doing nothing.

An insider told the Eye the decision to pay the four "was internally justified as a 'normal contractual requirement'. However, internal discussions revealed significant dissatisfaction, as this is far from a routine situation."