Care experienced young people are a neglected demographic
Written by Lola Cook
More than half of all 23-year-olds in the UK are living with parents.
Being independent as a young adult is becoming harder and harder with sky rocketing rent and house prices plus a cost-of-living crisis. No wonder young people are more reliant on parents.
But imagine that you’ve lived your adolescence in the care system and, now entering young adulthood, you’ve been spat out into the real world where staff don’t turn up to your supported accommodation and your ‘corporate parent’ (local authority) deems you magically fit for independence as soon as you turn 18. With no parental support or guidance on how to live in this world as an adult, care-experienced people are being fired off a cliff edge by the very hands of the system that is meant to protect them from harm.
The UK care system is in national crisis. As of March 2023 41% of local authorities were graded ‘requires improvement’ or ‘inadequate’, meaning that 33,620 children of the 82,000 children who are in care are not living in satisfactory living standards and Hereford is included in this. In Ofsted’s 2022 inspection of Herefordshire Local Authority Children’s Services, Ofsted stated that “Children and young people in Herefordshire are not protected from harm.”
The purpose of the care system is to remove children from harm and take them into safety, but it is evident that that is no longer the truth for a worryingly large proportion of children in care. How has the system been allowed to crumble to this extent and where is the concern for the flocks of failed children and young adults?
Maz was 14 when she was taken into care. She’d lived in a small market town all her life until she was put in her first foster placement in Hereford. This was, to her 14-year-old eyes, a huge and daunting city. Her feelings of dread were not eased by foster parent ‘house rules’, a curfew of six o’clock and not being allowed to lock her bedroom door. As the weeks passed, rules were broken and Maz suffered the consequences. Maz knew that foster parents received money for clothes, toiletries and any other needs but says she never saw that money being spent on her. Eventually she was removed from this first foster placement - “I was moved on with a bin bag to pack my things”.
“At no point did anyone check if I was being cared for properly, they just trusted the word of my foster parents”, said Maz, who recorded a podcast with the P.O.V. project in 2021.
Her story opens your eyes to how easy it is for people to become foster parents for purely exploitative reasons. Maz changed foster placements four times between the ages of 14-16. While she was lucky enough to have a wonderful relationship with her last foster placement - Maz says this was the first foster parent to show her the care, respect and warmth that all children in care deserve - she was soon moved on and, after her 16th birthday, sent to live in 16+ residential care first in Worcester and then, aged 17, to a two-bed flat in Leominster.
At 17-years-old, trying to learn the ropes of independent adult life, Maz faced a fight to make a home for herself. When she received an eye-watering bill for having an empty spare room - the bedroom tax - she called her support worker for help, only to be told she had to go to court to argue against the charge. When the court date came, Maz’s support worker wasn’t there and Maz stood alone in front of a judge who concluded that the teenager had been “failed by the system”. The only way to aviod the charge however was to be evicted. Maz was made homeless “thanks to the care system”.
This is just one story. There are thousands of young people who are suffering consequences of having grown up in the care system. Research has found that between a quarter and a third of people experiencing street homelessness have at some point been in local authority care as children, and that homelessness opens them up to plethora of dangers such as drug use, increased risk of prison, sex work, and violence. The cliff-edge that care-experienced people face is, for some, a slope into death.
We are dealing with arguably the most vulnerable demographic in the country and the support just isn’t there for the people who need it the most. It’s easy to take for granted being taken shopping by your parent as a child, learning how to post a parcel, how to iron, how to pay your gas bill, how to apply for a job, how to be emotionally intelligent, how to ask for help and then being instilled with the confidence to do these things but always knowing you have a parent that you can ask for help.
These are the simple foundations that a lot of care-experienced people were never taught and enter adulthood without, and the care-system just assumes that they will be ok. Responsibility must be taken for the continuous disregard of a failed and neglected demographic who are denied their right to a fair shot at living.