Social Care

When the State Becomes the Parent

Social Care
Overview

There is no relationship in British public life more one-sided than the one between a child in care and the authority that holds them. The child has no choice, no lawyer on retainer, and no newspaper willing to take their side. The council is legally their parent — and almost nothing happens to it when it parents badly.

That is the gap this campaign exists to close. Social care is not a niche brief bolted onto a media accountability platform. It is the same argument: institutions that hold power over a person's life must be answerable to that person, in a forum with real consequences.

1989: The Children Act — the statute that makes a local authority the corporate parent of every child it looks after.
2014: The Care Act and the Children and Families Act — duties on paper that are routinely rationed in practice.
10th: Care experience, named as the tenth protected characteristic under the All Citizens Protection Law.

Three Commitments Behind Every Page in This Section

Corporate parenting becomes an enforceable duty, not guidance. The corporate parenting principles are currently a list of things a council should "have regard to". A duty owed to nobody in particular is a duty owed to nobody. It should be owed to the child, and the child should be able to enforce it.
Care experience is protected by name, for life. No cut-off at eighteen, twenty-one or twenty-five. A care-experienced adult refused a tenancy, a job or a bank account because of where they grew up has a protected ground to point at.
The care system stops manufacturing criminal records. A child must not leave state care with a conviction earned entirely inside the placement the state chose for them.

Each of these runs through the All Citizens Protection Law, which brings the Equality Act 2010 and the Human Rights Act 1998 into a single enforceable statute — and adds care experience to the list of things you cannot lawfully hold against a person.

Pages in This Section

Detail &
Commitments

Children in Care

Placement stability, sibling separation, out-of-area moves, advocacy that is actually independent, and the duty to listen to a child about their own life.

Read the commitments

Looked-After Children & Care Leavers

Care experience as the tenth protected characteristic, the end of the cliff edge at eighteen, and protection from retaliatory criminalisation.

Read the commitments

Missing Children

The full London safeguarding procedure on children missing from care, home or education — police and council duties, the return interview, and what this seat will push for.

Read the procedure

What This Means Locally

Cities of London
& Westminster

Two Corporate Parents in One Constituency

This constituency is covered by two very different authorities — Westminster City Council and the City of London Corporation — each a corporate parent to the children in its care, each with its own children's services, its own complaints route and its own record.

An MP cannot run a children's services department, and should not pretend otherwise. What an MP can do is make the record public: publish how many looked-after children each authority places outside the borough, how long placements last, how many care leavers are in secure housing at nineteen, and how many complaints were upheld.

A Standing Casework Commitment

Care cases will not be triaged to the bottom of the constituency postbag. Any resident who is a care leaver, a foster or kinship carer, or a young person currently looked after gets a direct route into this office, and their case is taken up with the authority in writing.

Where an authority refuses to answer, the correspondence goes on the public record. Institutions behave differently when the file can be read.

The Constituency First Pledge Applies Here

Social care sits partly inside the core human rights mandate and partly outside it. Where a vote concerns the enforceability of rights for children in care, that is mandate territory and the position is fixed. Where a vote concerns funding levels, structures or local delivery choices, the constituency decides and this seat votes as the majority directs.