Brushwood failings under scrutiny as council apologises after CQC inspection
In January the council was talking about ‘impressive results’ at its Speke care home, but just two months later its own internal inspection found widespread problems
*Disclosure: John Brace is married to a current Merseycare employee (who in the interests of clarity has never worked at Brushwood during their career)
If you had been following Liverpool Council’s public statements at the beginning of this year, you might have been forgiven for thinking a page was finally being turned at Brushwood House in Speke.
The council had taken over the running of the troubled care home in August 2024 after the previous private operator walked away and, by January this year, was reporting the decision was ‘already delivering impressive results’, more than 80 new jobs and further improvements to the service. Within weeks, however, serious concerns were emerging behind the scenes.
Liverpool Council has told the Monitor that a full internal inspection it carried out in March identified areas of concern at Brushwood, led to safeguarding referrals and resulted in a ‘detailed action plan’. By July, the Care Quality Commission had also become involved, carrying out an unannounced inspection after concerns were raised about people’s safety and the leadership and management of the service. The council has since said the concerns which led to that inspection came from its own officers raising the alarm.
The CQC inspection
Earlier this month, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), which is the regulator for healthcare and social care services in England, published an inspection report on Brushwood House.
Brushwood House is a 60-bed nursing home in Speke, Liverpool, with 39 residents at the time of the inspection. Liverpool City Council is the CQC-registered provider, while Primary Care 24 (known as PC24) provides nursing care and clinical oversight.
The CQC inspection was carried out on 15, 22 and 30 July 2026 and gave Brushwood House an overall rating of inadequate, with inadequate ratings for safety, effectiveness, caring, responsiveness and whether it was well-led.
The CQC carried out the inspection because of information it had received about people’s safety as well as leadership and governance at the home.
The report stated: ‘Significant failings were found in relation to person-centred care, dignity and respect, consent, safe care and treatment, medicines, safeguarding, nutrition and hydration, staffing and governance.’
It also found that ‘opportunities to learn from incidents, complaints and safeguarding concerns were frequently missed’.
As a result of the inspection, the CQC placed the service in special measures, the purpose of which is to ensure ‘significant improvements’ are made.
There is an extraordinary meeting of Liverpool City Council’s adult social care and health scrutiny committee on Monday, 21 September, which will discuss the issues that led to the CQC inspection findings and what the council proposes to do in response.
An accompanying council report acknowledges the seriousness of the problems identified and states that the failings subsequently identified by the CQC were ‘consistent with the Directorate’s own internal assessment of the services’.
What was already known?
The council says the problems hadn’t first come to its attention through the CQC inspection. Instead, it seems it was the council that told the CQC there were serious issues.
Its own internal inspection had already taken place four months earlier and, according to the local authority, had uncovered concerns serious enough to trigger safeguarding referrals and the action plan. The council says that where safeguarding concerns were identified during its own internal inspection process, they were acted on immediately and also reported to the regulator.
There is, however, little sign of the seriousness of those concerns in the public council record during the same period. The Monitor found only scant reference to the quality or safety of care at Brushwood in reports brought before the council committee responsible for scrutinising adult health and social care in March, July or earlier this month, although it was already well aware of the scale of failings at the home.
When councillors did hear about Brushwood and its sister home, Millvina House during that time - at a committee meeting held in July - that account spoke of the council’s takeover in positive terms, with a report saying it was ‘delivering service improvements’ and boosting residents’ and staff wellbeing. By that point, though, from what the council has said, its action plan had already been in place for several months following the concerns identified in March.
A troubled history
Brushwood’s latest problems are only the most recent chapter in a difficult history stretching back almost to the opening of the building itself.
The £8m, 60-bed home opened amid some fanfare in 2019 as one of two new council-owned care facilities, alongside Millvina House near Anfield Stadium. It was opened as part of what then-mayor Joe Anderson described at the time as the council’s ‘invest to save’ strategy, intended to increase the city’s supply of dementia and nursing care.
Initially, the council didn’t operate the home itself - it owned the building while care was provided by private operator Shaw Healthcare. Following the Covid pandemic, the two homes were hit by problems including low occupancy and concerns about financial viability before Shaw subsequently withdrew.
At one point, the council said it would have to close the homes, but after public backlash and campaigning by local residents in 2020, the homes were saved with Shaw agreeing to a temporary extension of its operations while the council sought a replacement.
Wellington Healthcare, part of Bloomcare, took over, but Brushwood continued to struggle. The home was rated as ‘requires improvement‘ before deteriorating to ‘inadequate’ overall in 2023, when 56 of its 60 beds were occupied. Safety and leadership were rated inadequate, while effectiveness, caring and responsiveness required improvement, and the home was placed into special measures. Wellington later withdrew too, prompting the council to step in as the registered provider on a temporary basis in August 2024 while reviewing its options.
Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust initially provided nursing care and clinical oversight while the council ran the rest. Healthwatch Liverpool, the city’s independent health and social care watchdog, carried out a visit in January 2025 and described Brushwood as being in a ‘transitional state between providers’.
As well as an entire floor being out of action and occupancy having fallen to just 32 beds, the report said parts of the relatively new building appeared ‘run down and unappealing’ and, in some areas, ‘dirty and unclean’, while also recording improvements already being made and positive examples of care and practice.
Mersey Care subsequently gave notice that it wouldn’t continue providing the nursing element of the service beyond May 2025, prompting the council to begin a procurement exercise for a replacement provider, with PC24 later taking over the nursing provision.
By September 2025, the council had reached another important decision following a review of the available options. The local authority announced it had decided to remain as the CQC registered provider for Brushwood and Millvina House, saying the arrangement offered the ‘most stable and effective solution for residents’.
Four months later in January came the upbeat announcement in a press release about ‘impressive results’, and just two months after that, the internal inspection which ultimately led to the CQC report that was released on 9th September.
What happens now?
The council says safeguarding arrangements at Brushwood have been strengthened, management and clinical oversight increased and more permanent staff have been recruited.
A joint improvement plan with PC24 covers multiple areas, including safeguarding, governance, workforce, risk management, medicines, nutrition and hydration, wound care, the physical environment and residents’ activities and wellbeing.
New arrangements have also been introduced to improve the way incidents are identified, reviewed and escalated, alongside greater oversight of safeguarding concerns. The council had also said no new residents will be admitted to Brushwood until both the council and CQC are satisfied sufficient improvements have been made.
The council and PC24 have also jointly developed a ‘Workforce, Culture and Improvement Position Statement’. The scrutiny report due to be discussed on Monday states both organisations recognise that ‘long-term improvement depends upon strong leadership, a positive organisational culture, effective partnership working, good governance and the consistent application of learning in practice’.
In a statement to the Monitor, a Liverpool Council spokesperson said: ‘A comprehensive programme of improvements is underway at Brushwood House Care Home in Speke following the Care Quality Commission’s recent inspection and rating of the service as inadequate.
‘This is extremely disappointing, and we are deeply sorry that the care and experience at Brushwood House has not met the standards residents and families have every right to expect and deserve.
‘Brushwood House is more than a care setting. It is the home of the people who live there. Everyone should feel safe, valued and supported in their own home, and we are working closely with staff, residents and families to make the necessary improvements.
‘While we accept the findings of the inspection, we are fully committed to ensuring residents receive the safe, high-quality care they deserve. We will continue to work closely with the CQC throughout this improvement programme and provide regular updates on the progress being made.’
What about Millvina House?
Millvina House was not the subject of the CQC inspection published this month, but it shares much of Brushwood’s recent history and has been operating under the same overall council model.
Liverpool Council told the Monitor that Millvina House has also been ‘subject to the same programme of internal quality assurance inspections’. Where areas for improvement have been identified, it said, ‘action plans have been put in place and are being monitored.’
The council report for Monday’s meeting also doesn’t entirely confine itself to Brushwood, referring to concerns around the quality and safety of care provision at ‘the care homes’, including significant safeguarding concerns and a lack of assurance about their day-to-day operation.
The scrutiny report says the adult social care cabinet member has been kept ‘fully briefed’, with information provided at planned briefing meetings and through regular updates in between. The Monitor asked the council why this was not brought to the scrutiny committee sooner but did not receive a specific response to that question.
In any case, councillors are likely to hear much more about what went wrong at Brushwood, the current state of play at the two council-run homes and what is being done about it all when the scrutiny committee meets on Monday.
The extraordinary meeting begins at 5pm in the Conference Suite at the Cunard Building and is open to the public. Up to three members of the public can speak or ask a question relevant to the agenda for up to two minutes each. The deadline for submitting those public questions has now passed.
You can find out more details about the meeting here: https://councillors.liverpool.gov.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?CId=1870&MId=22015
*Update: This article has been updated to include reference to the council’s intended closure of the homes in 2020 after Shaw announced it was pulling out. The episode hadn’t made it into the earlier version but, on reflection, it should have been included for clarity and the piece has been amended to reflect this.
Before you go…
If you’d like to see what else we’ve got in store for you in the coming weeks, please check back on the site regularly for updates. You can of course also sign up for our completely free emails, usually one or two a week (although you may have noticed our relative absence in recent weeks with school holidays and logistics having got a little in the way). Just click the button below to sign up, which also means you can comment and we’d love you tell us your thoughts about today’s story.
The Monitor is a Merseyside-based and focused public interest news site operating on a not-for-profit basis. All our stories are free to read and we rely on the goodwill of reader donations to keep what we’re doing sustainable and free of any annoying paywalls. If you’ve got the capacity to donate, we’d love your support.
Thanks for having a nose, it already makes you part of what we’re doing here at the Monitor. We appreciate you supporting local public interest journalism on Merseyside.
