There should be more protection for young people as they move on from being in care, say West Sussex councillors

During a meeting of the full council on Friday (October 13), members of all parties approved a notice of motion from Paul Linehan (Con, Bramber Castle) which called for being in care to be a protected characteristic, alongside things such as age, disability, race, religion and sexual orientation.

Mr Linehan used his own experiences in care to explain to councillors how discrimination could rear its ugly head.

He told the meeting that he had been in care from 1971 to 1988 – pretty much his entire childhood – and only recently managed to gain access to his file.

It showed that a note in his file listed his being in care as the reason his application to join the RAF had not been progressed.

Mr Linehan said: “It’s often difficult on the outside to understand the specific experiences of others.

“We can empathise, we can sympathise and we can even go so far as to relate. But some situations are difficult to imagine unless you’ve experienced them directly.

“This is the way that it is with discrimination.

“What it is like to be at the receiving end of stigma and prejudice – often delivered by professionals who have no idea that they think and behave in the way that they do.”

The notice of motion followed an Independent Review of Children’s Social Care led by Josh McCallister, CEO of Frontline, England’s largest social work charity, which was published in May 2022.

The review recommended that the government ‘should make care experience a protected characteristic’ and new legislation should be passed which ‘broadens corporate parenting responsibilities across a wider set of public bodies and organisations’.

Each year, more than 10,000 young people in England leave the care system every year on their 18th birthday.

Only 13 per cent of those have entered higher education by their 19th birthday, compared to 45 per cent of the wider population.

Care leavers make up 25 per cent of the homeless population.

With the recommendations from the review yet to be made law, Mr Linehan’s motion called on leader Paul Marshall and the members of his cabinet to get ahead of the game and ensure the council treated care experience as if it were a protected characteristic.

Also ‘to provide greater authority to employers, businesses, public services and policy makers to put in place policies and programmes which promote better outcomes for care experienced young people’.

Mr Marshall was also asked to write to the Department for Education and the county’s MPs to inform them about the action taken.