Protected characteristics: you decide if care experience belongs in it

Should care experience be a protected characteristic? That’s not for me to decide, it’s a decision that sits with you, the reader.

Over the next 12 weeks I will release one blog a week to help you understand the protected characteristics campaign, and most importantly, make a decision if care experience should be protected in Equality Law.

Equality law is not a symbolic statement. It is a serious moral and legal decision. Other protected characteristics exist because of deep, historic injustice. Whole groups of people were excluded, harmed and denied dignity for generations.

That history matters. It carries weight. It deserves respect.

I am not saying that care-experienced people do not experience discrimination.

Some clearly do.

What these blogs are questioning is whether discrimination is the primary problem, whether it is happening at scale, and whether it is the right explanation for the outcomes we see. If it is not, legal protection, however well intentioned, risks addressing the wrong cause.

Before I make my argument, I want you to make yours.

Rather than taking my word for it, I want you to reflect for yourself on what is actually happening to care-experienced people and what sits behind it. The questions below are not a test. They are a thinking tool.

Start by listing the issues you think care-experienced people face.

Then, for each one, ask yourself what sits beneath it:

• D, Is this discrimination: being treated unfairly because of who someone is?
• L, Is this a lack of services, support or capacity?
• S, Or is it something else: trauma, poverty, instability, loss, or disrupted relationships?

Now look at those you’ve marked  D.

Ask yourself honestly:

• Would protected status change this in practice?
• What would it force organisations to do differently?
• What would it realistically prevent?

Then look at everything you marked L or S.

Ask a harder question:

• What would actually fix this?
• Law or services?
• Recognition or resources?
• Labels or capacity?

For care experience to become a protected characteristic, we must be able to show what discrimination exists, where it is happening, how often it occurs, and what legal protection would actually change.

This campaign doesn't provide that clarity. Without clarity, protection risks becoming symbolic - and symbolism does not heal harm.

Law is not a feeling. It is a tool.

If we are going to use it, we should know exactly what it is for.