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You shouldn’t have to regulate the regulator
Welcome to The Fixer, a weekly newsletter from The WayFinders Group. We’re organisational repair specialists who repair damage, rebuild trust, and restore performance. On Fridays we break down the corporate crises and leadership failures that happen when damage goes unrepaired.
Leah Brown FRSA
February 20, 2026
In partnership with
Friday’s fiasco: who is watching the watchmen?
England's health and social care regulator has no permanent Chair and no permanent CEO. Five people have held the top executive role in under two years. The body responsible for catching failures across the entire NHS cannot currently catch its own.
image source: cqc.org.uk
Professor Sir Mike Richards resigned as Chair of the Care Quality Commission (CQC) on 6 February 2026, less than a year into the role. He follows Sir Julian Hartley, who resigned as CEO in October 2025, three days after an independent inquiry into maternity services at Leeds Teaching Hospitals was announced. Hartley led Leeds from 2013 to 2023; during that period, at least 56 babies and two mothers died in potentially preventable circumstances. Leeds had the highest neonatal mortality rate in England, roughly 70% higher than comparable trusts. Bereaved families said his CQC appointment had been "a scandal hiding in plain sight" and that it had "fallen onto families to highlight" rather than the system.
The Penny Dash review, commissioned in 2024, found the CQC had lost credibility across the sector. One in five providers had no current rating. The new inspection framework, years in development, was described as chaotic and unfit for purpose. Health Secretary Wes Streeting called the organisation "not fit for purpose."
What would we advise incoming CQC leadership?
None of that damage lives in any individual leader. It lives in systems, culture, and governance structures that remain largely unchanged while the names at the top continue to rotate.
In fact, the pattern here is not bad individuals making bad decisions. It is an organisation running on fumes of crisis management. New leaders arrive, inherit unresolved damage, face the impossible task of transformation without a solid foundation, and then they leave and the cycle repeats.
Acknowledgement: name what actually happened. Not the departures; the conditions that made experienced leaders unable to succeed. That includes the governance failures that allowed the Leeds appointment to proceed without challenge.
Apology: the organisation owes its staff, the providers it regulates, and the families who raised concerns that the system ignored an honest account of why the past two years unfolded as they did.
Accountability: establish the mechanisms that should have flagged the Leeds mortality data before an appointment was made, and make clear those mechanisms now apply to board-level decisions, as well as trust inspections.
Amends: rebuild sector credibility by demonstrating that CQC's own governance meets the standards it requires of others. Until it does, it cannot confirm who is watching the watchmen.
The real fiasco is not that two leaders have departed in under two years. It is that the organisation designed to protect patients cannot protect its own credibility. It might sound like a recruitment problem but it’s actually a repair problem.
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For chairs, CEOs and senior partners
The Leeds data was not hidden. It was publicly available, and the families flagging it were not insiders with privileged access; they were bereaved parents who had been raising concerns for years. The failure was not a lack of information. It was a decision-making culture in which nobody was required to ask the uncomfortable question before the appointment was confirmed.
If you're reading this thinking "we've got a version of this" — you're not alone. Most boards we work with have a version of this. By the time it becomes someone's job, the damage is already accumulating. Due diligence is thorough on financials, track record, and technical capability. Questions about how someone has handled harm, accountability, or failure in previous roles are treated as impolite, premature, or someone else's job. Worse still, people in senior roles are expected to self-certify beyond references and track record.
Reply to this email to arrange a 20-minute conversation about what your appointment processes are designed to assess, and what they might be missing.
For chief people officers
Standard recruitment frameworks assess competence, cultural fit, and leadership style. They rarely ask: what harm occurred on this person's watch, who was affected, and what did they do about it? Those questions feel like legal risk or reputational aggression, so they don't get asked.
If you're reading this thinking "we've got a version of this" — you're not alone. The issue is rarely the recruitment process. It's that the underlying damage from previous harm never got addressed; it got filed, managed, or quietly absorbed into the organisation's folklore. The next senior appointment walks into it without knowing it's there. And the cycle continues.
Reply to this email to discuss what repair actually looks like before the next appointment inherits the problem.
Forthcoming research
The pattern above is exactly what our next white paper examines: what actually happens to the human damage after a workplace investigation closes.
The leader is gone. The recommendations are gathering dust. But the staff who raised concerns still don't know if it's safe to speak up next time. The dissenting board members have either resigned or retreated. And the organisation that survived one governance crisis has quietly concluded it can survive another.
We're calling it "The investigation paradox: why regulated organisations fail to repair human damage after formal processes close." We're gathering data to understand why, and to build the evidence base that makes repair impossible to ignore.
If you work for a regulated organisation and you've ever managed a workplace investigation, we'd like to hear from you. The survey takes five to seven minutes and closes on 31 March. Everyone who completes it will receive cross-sector benchmarking data, the executive summary, and the full white paper when it publishes in May 2026.
Plus, who doesn’t love a prize draw?
Help us give you the data to prove repair isn't optional. Take the 5-7 minute survey here: https://forms.gle/oMQvCZmSgMBUT3Hw9
Leah Brown FRSA is the UK's leading specialist in organisational repair and founder of The WayFinders Group.
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