For anyone assessing sites for care home development, retirement living, or any elderly accommodation scheme, the desktop research phase just got meaningfully more useful. We've added a new Care Home Locations layer to LandInsight, powered by Care Quality Commission (CQC) data. It's live now under People & Places.
Here's what's in it, why it matters, and how to use it well.
What is the CQC, and Why Does This Data Matter?
The Care Quality Commission is the independent regulator of health and social care in England. Every care home that provides residential accommodation alongside personal or nursing care is required to register with the CQC and undergo regular inspection. Those inspections result in an overall rating: Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement, or Inadequate.
For care home developers, that data has always been publicly available in principle - but accessing it in a useful, spatial form, cross-referenced against ownership, planning history, and demographics, required stitching together multiple sources. That's the gap this layer closes.
What's In the Layer?
Every care home regulated by the CQC in England is now visible on the LandInsight map, colour-coded by its latest overall rating. Click on any location and you get the full picture:
- Care home name and type
- Overall CQC rating
- Number of registered beds
- Provider name and ownership type
- Full address and local authority
- Companies House number and ODS code
- Whether the rating has been inherited
- Date opened
The dataset is updated every 30 days and sourced directly from the CQC.
How to Use It In Practice
The layer becomes particularly powerful when used alongside LandInsight's Demographics layer. The combination lets you identify areas where the supply of care beds is low and the population is ageing -essentially a visual demand/supply gap analysis at the desktop stage, before you've committed any resource to a site.
The workflow is straightforward:
- Toggle on the Care Home Locations layer
- Toggle on the Demographics layer
- Update the demographics view to show areas with ageing populations
- Cross-reference against ownership data and planning history as usual
This won't replace the detailed feasibility work that comes later. But it makes the early-stage targeting considerably more informed. Rather than working from a rough sense of where care provision is thin, you can see it directly - rated, mapped, and attributed.
Where to Find It
Open the layers panel and look for Care Home Locations under People & Places. Available now on Unlimited accounts.
Take a look at the video below for a quick product run-through.
Not a customer of LandInsight? Click the below to get started.
