Care experience follows a person for life. The protection attached to it currently stops at a birthday. This page sets out how that changes.
The Equality Act 2010 lists nine protected characteristics. It does not name the one group the state is legally the parent of. That silence is the loophole.
A care-experienced young person who is turned away, talked down to, or written off can rarely point to a protected ground — so the discrimination is real, obvious to everyone in the room, and not actionable. Dozens of councils have already voted to treat care experience as a protected characteristic locally, and the Independent Review of Children's Social Care recommended doing it nationally. This campaign finishes the job in statute, so it stops depending on the goodwill of whoever runs a particular authority this year.
It becomes unlawful to treat a looked-after or care-experienced person less favourably because of their care status — in education, employment, housing, healthcare, policing, financial services or public administration.
Indirect discrimination matters most here. The rules that shut care leavers out are usually neutral on their face: guarantor requirements, parental-income declarations, landlord references covering years the applicant spent in placements, "next of kin" fields with no valid answer. None of it is aimed at care leavers. All of it lands on them.
Turning eighteen in care means the support structure is dismantled on a schedule set by the calendar rather than by readiness. Nobody parenting their own child would do this, and no council should be able to.
The commitment: leaving-care support keyed to readiness, not to a birthday — with a duty on the corporate parent to demonstrate that housing, income, education or employment, health registration and a named continuing relationship are all in place before support steps down, and to keep the door open afterwards.
A teenager in residential care can leave the system with a criminal record earned entirely inside the placement the state put them in. A door kicked in a family home is a bad evening. The same door in a children's home becomes criminal damage, a police attendance, a charge.
The commitment: police escalation involving a looked-after child triggers a duty to record and justify, and the corporate parent must show it attempted every alternative first. Restorative and in-house resolution becomes the default; prosecution becomes the exception that has to be argued for.
People who challenge an institution too persistently find themselves recast as the problem — vexatious, obstructive, a nuisance. Care-experienced young people are the sharpest example, because the institution they are complaining about is also the one responsible for them.
Pursuing a rights complaint against a public body cannot itself be treated as misconduct. Where the complainant is a looked-after child or care leaver, the same protection binds the corporate parent that escalated them into the criminal justice system instead of parenting them.
A looked-after child's Article 8 right to private and family life, Article 3 protection from degrading treatment, and Article 2 of Protocol 1 right to education are enforced in the same claim as their equality rights. One forum, one statute, one hearing — no more losing in the space between two Acts.
The Constituency First Pledge means this seat votes as the majority of the constituency directs on issues outside the core mandate. Lifelong legal protection for care-experienced people is inside the core mandate. It is a human rights and equality commitment, it was on the ballot, and it is not up for renegotiation afterwards.
Funding levels, delivery structures and local commissioning choices sit outside that core — and on those, the constituency decides.
Register to join the secure constituency polling platform and back care experience as the tenth protected characteristic.
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