It's something that's seemingly been about to happen for a very long time without ever quite making it to the start line.
To recap: In July 2005, then care services minister Liam Byrne said registration in England should be extended to domiciliary and residential care staff to improve user safety and public confidence. At the time, he said: "We must move quickly."
The following year, he promised the register would be opened to these groups from April 2007. In February 2007, Byrne's successor, Ivan Lewis, said the register would be extended to domiciliary care staff only in late 2007 or early 2008. In February of this year, Lewis said he hoped it would be "late summer" - but the latest word from the Department of Health is that an announcement will happen "in due course".
Registration was seen as a way of driving up standards across social care, increasing status and, as Byrne said in that 2005, improving user safety and public confidence.
However, there are question marks about the registration of domiciliary care workers on these and other grounds:- there are concerns that there is no real framework to drive continuous professional development for those who are registered; the turnover rate for domiciliary care workers is 25-30% meaning that many of the people who do get registered may spend little time in the sector; the Protection of Vulnerable Adults List and its successor, the Independent Safeguarding Authority vetting and barring scheme, some argue, is the vehicle for protecting service users from people who should not be working in home care; and the combined costs of the ISA scheme (£64) and registration (£20 a year) will load extra costs on to providers with staff unlikely to be able to afford them and councils likely to be unwilling to meet them.
So some are questioning whether it is worth it - however, the feeling from people I've spoken to is that some clarity and leadership from the DH wouldn't go amiss at this stage.