The sign that said: “No care leavers”

Whenever I think about housing for care leavers, I see dark, dilapidated properties accommodating lonely souls. Behind them, I see social workers and personal advisers who feel the weight of a system’s failures - failures they often carry as their own.

In one part of the country, a housing provider even displayed a sign reading “no care leavers.” Exclusionary signage like this inevitably evokes painful histories of racism and segregation - histories that led to race being protected by law.

This blog looks specifically at housing. It explores the challenges care-experienced people face, asks whether discrimination is truly the main barrier, and examines whether protected characteristic status would meaningfully solve the problem.

I often hear care leavers tell me they’ve been encouraged to “register as homeless” to access housing. We might not want to believe this happens, but anyone working with care leavers is probably already nodding along. There is no official policy that says this, and no leaving care service will ever admit it is a practice. So rather than ask you to take my word for it, I’ll share the law.

To avoid unnecessary legal jargon, here is the simplest way to understand how the law works: it responds most strongly once crisis has already hit, such as becoming homeless.

This response is embedded in two Acts: the Housing Act 1996 and the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017.

This is important because the campaign for care experience to become a protected characteristic often argues that care leavers should be made a “priority” - but in housing law, we already are. And when it comes to automatic access to social housing, many care leavers already get it. They just don’t take priority over someone who is already homeless.

The problem is not a lack of priority status. It’s that the housing system is operating under intense pressure: high demand and dwindling social housing stock. Other prioritised groups - pregnant women, older people, and those affected by emergencies such as Grenfell - are all competing for the same limited pool of homes.

You cannot prioritise people into homes that do not exist.

In 2024, Become reported that England had 48,050 care leavers aged 17 to 21. In the same release, they stated that 4,300 care leavers aged 18 to 20 were assessed as homeless or at risk.

Because the datasets use different age bands, we can’t calculate an exact percentage. However, the data allows us to estimate that roughly 14 to 17% of care leavers may be experiencing homelessness or the threat of it.

However, the data from the campaign to make care experience a protected characteristic tells a different story.

Their repeated claim that “25% of the homeless population have experienced care” is read in newsrooms, shared across social media, and even quoted by MPs. Yet, when I tried to trace this figure, I couldn’t find any recent or conclusive data to support it.

My curiosity led me back to the original source of the claim: a piece of research carried out by Crisis and Cardiff University over a decade ago called ‘Nations Apart?’. The study explored the experiences of 480 people who were homeless. It found that:

• 64% experienced significant unemployment
• 49% had mental health issues
• 46% had alcohol dependency
• 48% had drug dependency
• 24% had been in local authority care

A useful study - but its limitations matter.

The 480 participants were grouped into four broad regions: London, England, Scotland and Wales. There was no information about the deprivation levels of the areas where they lived, which is critical because, as a Parliament Inquiry stated, “homelessness is heavily concentrated amongst the poorest sections of the population.

The campaign fails to recognise the compounding factors at play when you look at homelessness through an intersectional lens, a reoccurring issue for them.

Making care experience a protected characteristic won’t address unemployment, mental health, addiction or poverty - the largest risk factors driving homelessness.

The data matters if we want to change the law. A reform of this scale must be rooted in evidence, not assumption.

Despite the limited evidence, some councils have already passed motions to act as if care experience is a protected characteristic. Two years on, we can now test whether this has made any meaningful difference - particularly in housing.

Before we look at one of those councils, let me offer a short thought exercise.

Imagine walking past an estate agent and seeing a poster in the window that says:

“No disabled people allowed.”

How would you respond? How do you think the public would react? How quickly would the council intervene?

Now imagine visiting a housing provider’s website and seeing:

“No care leavers.”

You don’t need to imagine it - because it has already happened.

In 2023, a press release exposed a housing provider that had openly stated on its website that it would not offer housing to “care leavers.” The provider did not apologise. Instead, it announced it was “suspending those involved pending an investigation.” A statement like “no care leavers” is unlikely to be the work of one rogue staff member; decisions of that nature typically require senior oversight and approval.

The council’s response was equally troubling. It simply stated that they would be “raising their concerns” with the provider. It read like a system distancing itself from its own failures.

What surprised me most was the reaction from one leader of the protected characteristic campaign, who said:

“I’m sure there is a rational explanation for whoever created the line ‘no care leavers.’”

Perhaps they meant to reassure the public, but language matters. The language we use must reflect the severity of what we are confronting.

There is no scenario where discrimination has a “rational explanation,” and no campaigner should ever imply otherwise. Discrimination is serious, wrong, and unjust.

The responses from the housing provider, the council, and the campaign illustrate a wider unwillingness to treat discrimination against care-experienced people as unacceptable and intolerable.

This is especially concerning given that the council involved had already passed a motion to act as if care experience were a protected characteristic.

This was always the risk of treating care experience as a protected characteristic: if nothing changes when discrimination occurs, then why did we do it? It erodes trust in leadership and undermines the credibility of equality legislation.

Real change for care-experienced people will come from confronting the structural drivers of homelessness - not from symbolic motions that cannot be enforced.