CQC Fit Person Interview: Questions and How to Answer Them
What you will actually be asked, and what the interview is really testing
The fit person interview is the stage of registration that people worry about most, and prepare for worst.
Part of the problem is how it gets described. People talk about it as though it were an exam with a syllabus you can revise. It isn't. It is a conversation designed to establish one thing: whether you understand the service you are applying to run, and whether you can be trusted to run it safely.
I have prepared a lot of managers and nominated individuals for this interview. The ones who do well are not the ones who memorised the regulations. They are the ones who could talk about their own service in detail.
Who has to do it
If you are applying as a registered manager, you will be interviewed. If you are a nominated individual or an individual provider, you will usually be interviewed too.
The interview is normally held by video call and lasts around an hour to ninety minutes. It is not adversarial. The assessor is trying to establish whether you meet the requirements under Regulation 7 of the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014 — good character, and the qualifications, competence, skills and experience necessary to manage the regulated activity.
Note the wording. "Necessary to manage the regulated activity" — not care in general. Your service.
The single most important thing to understand
Almost every question is really the same question in different clothing: do you know this service, or do you know care in general?
Generic answers about person-centred care do not land. Specific answers about how you would manage a specific risk, in this specific setting, with the staff you actually have, do.
Before you read the questions below, do this: read your own statement of purpose and application form from start to finish. Most of the interview comes directly from what you have written. People are caught out by being asked to explain something they submitted weeks earlier and have not looked at since.
About you and your role
1. Tell me about your background and experience.
Two minutes, not ten. Focus on the experience relevant to this service type.
2. Why do you want to be the registered manager here?
They are listening for whether you understand what you are taking on. Personal accountability is a reasonable thing to mention.
3. What are your responsibilities as a registered manager?
Say the uncomfortable part out loud: you carry personal legal responsibility, separate from the provider's. Candidates who know this sound ready.
4. What qualifications do you hold?
For adult social care, expect to discuss your Level 5 Diploma in Leadership and Management for Adult Care, or an accepted equivalent, and your supervisory experience.
5. What would you do if the provider asked you to do something you thought was unsafe?
This one is quietly important. They are testing whether you will exercise independent judgement. "I would raise it, document it, and escalate it if it wasn't resolved" is the shape of a good answer. Deferring to the owner is not.
6. What are your development needs?
Say something real. A manager with no development needs is either not looking or not telling.
Your service
7. Describe your service and who it is for.
This should match your statement of purpose word for word in substance. Be specific about needs and dependency levels, not "adults aged 18 to 65 with a range of needs".
8. How many people will you support, and with what staffing?
Have the numbers. Ratios, shift patterns, how you cover sickness.
9. What is your local market and why is there demand?
More often asked of home care and supported living applicants, where a business plan is required.
10. How will you support someone on their first day?
A practical question that quickly reveals whether the model is real or theoretical.
11. What would a typical day look like for someone using your service?
Answer as if describing one real person, not a category.
Safeguarding
12. What would you do if a member of staff reported a safeguarding concern?
Walk through it in order: make the person safe, report to the local authority, notify CQC, preserve evidence, support the person, involve the police if a crime may have occurred.
13. Who do you report safeguarding concerns to, and in what timescale?
Know your local authority safeguarding team and how to reach them. Know that CQC must be notified.
14. What would you do if the allegation was about you?
Rare, and it catches people out. The answer is that you would step back and it would be handled by the provider or the local authority, not by you.
15. How would you know if someone was being abused if they could not tell you?
Changes in behaviour, withdrawal, changes in relationships, unexplained injuries, reluctance around a particular person.
Mental Capacity Act and deprivation of liberty
16. When would you carry out a mental capacity assessment?
Decision-specific and time-specific. Not a blanket judgement about a person.
17. What are the five principles of the Mental Capacity Act 2005?
Worth knowing properly. Assume capacity; support to decide; unwise decisions are allowed; best interests; least restrictive option.
18. What do you understand by a deprivation of liberty?
Be current. The Supreme Court changed the position on 2 June 2026, replacing the Cheshire West acid test with a multifactorial assessment — and held that someone can give valid consent even where they lack capacity under the Act, though where there is serious doubt no conclusion of valid consent can be drawn. A candidate who knows this is demonstrating exactly the professional currency the role requires.
Staffing and recruitment
19. Talk me through your recruitment process.
Application, interview, references, right to work, DBS, induction. Know what Schedule 3 requires you to hold.
20. What would you do if a DBS came back with a disclosure?
Risk assessment, not automatic rejection. Documented decision.
21. How do you make sure staff are competent, not just trained?
Supervision, observed practice, competency assessments. This distinction matters more under the new assessment framework.
22. What training is mandatory for your staff?
Include the statutory learning disability and autism training under Regulation 18, benchmarked against the Oliver McGowan Code of Practice since September 2025. Know which of your staff sit at Tier 1 and which at Tier 2, and why.
Governance and quality
23. How will you know whether your service is any good?
Audits, feedback, incident analysis, trends over time. Regulation 17 requires systems that assess, monitor and improve — and that you act on what they tell you.
24. Give me an example of an audit you would carry out and what you would do with the findings.
The second half of that question is the real one. An audit that identifies a problem and stops is a breach waiting to happen.
25. How will you seek feedback, and what will you do with it?
Seeking feedback is half the duty. Acting on it is the other half.
26. What would you do if quality started slipping?
Name it, analyse it, act, re-check. Do not claim it would not happen.
Notifications, candour and complaints
27. What must you notify CQC about?
Deaths, serious injuries, abuse or allegations of abuse, police involvement, deprivation of liberty applications and outcomes, service disruption, and absence of the registered manager for 28 days or more.
28. What is the duty of candour?
Regulation 20. When something goes wrong and causes harm, you tell the person, you apologise, you explain what you know, and you record it.
29. How would you handle a complaint from a family member?
Acknowledge, investigate, respond in writing, learn from it. Have your timescales ready.
What is changing
30. What do you know about the changes to CQC's assessment framework?
CQC is moving to sector-specific frameworks, replacing the 34 quality statements with 24 key lines of enquiry, and removing numerical scoring in favour of rating characteristics. A manager who can talk sensibly about this is showing they keep their professional knowledge current.
How I would prepare
Read your own application pack cold. Everything you submitted. Most questions come from it.
Prepare examples, not scripts. Assessors can tell when answers are memorised, and it works against you. Have three or four real situations you can draw on.
Practise saying "I don't know." Followed by where you would find out. That answer is far stronger than a confident guess, and guessing on a regulation you have half-remembered is the fastest way to undermine yourself.
Be able to name one thing that is not yet good. A manager who says everything is fine sounds either complacent or unaware.
Know this year's changes. Deprivation of liberty, the assessment framework, the Oliver McGowan Code. These are where candidates are being caught out at the moment.
What actually goes wrong
Not knowing your own statement of purpose. Answering about care in general rather than your service. Deferring every answer to the provider. Claiming perfection. Reciting regulations without being able to apply them.
None of those are about knowledge. They are about preparation.
Tiffany Nelson supports adult social care providers in England with CQC registration and inspection preparation, including fit person interview preparation and mock interviews. If you have an interview coming up and would like to practise, get in touch. See our CQC Registration Support.
Sources: Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014, Regulations 7, 17, 18, 19 and 20 and Schedule 3; Care Quality Commission (Registration) Regulations 2009; Mental Capacity Act 2005; A Reference by the Attorney General for Northern Ireland [2026] UKSC (2 June 2026); DHSC guidance on the definition of deprivation of liberty (15 June 2026); DHSC, The Oliver McGowan Code of Practice (final 6 September 2025); CQC draft adult social care assessment framework (24 March 2026).