About Settle

Settle supports care-experienced young people as they leave the care system and begin living independently. Our intensive coaching programme helps young people develop the confidence, skills and agency to avoid homelessness and build the foundations to thrive in adulthood. In FY2025/26, we worked with 236 young people leaving care across London,50% of whom had experience of seeking asylum.

We work in partnership with local authority leaving care and housing teams, housing providers and other care leaver, immigration and youth homelessness charities across London, and we are a member of the Alliance for Children in Care and Care Leavers.

Settle’s response draws on our experience and understanding of the circumstances, needs and aspirations of care leavers who entered the UK as unaccompanied asylum seeking children. While we do not work with children in care, the lives of the young people we work with have been shaped by the care system. Our response reflects their lived experience, and the principles and legal underpinnings of safe and effective social work practice.

Settle’s response to the Family Returns Consultation

Settle wish to state our objection on principle to the proposals in this consultation. We believe they will undermine the Home Office’s objectives to establish a fair and effective asylum system, as well the government’s wider aims to improve support for care leavers, to protect children and tackle child poverty, crime and homelessness.

As written, the proposals will lead to a number of unintended consequences and place even greater strain on overstretched public services. As such, we do not believe that the proposed transition to a more restrictive system should go ahead.

The Children Act 1989 establishes a foundational principle that in the state’s engagement with a child, the child’s welfare must be the paramount consideration. This principle applies equally to all children. It cannot be in the best interests of any child to remove the support without which they would become destitute.

The government’s Child Poverty Strategy (November 2025) sets out a cross-government ambition to reduce child poverty, with a particular focus on deep material poverty. These proposals will make children destitute, and will necessarily deepen child poverty and increase homelessness.

We are concerned that the proposals place significant additional verification and enforcement burdens on local authorities, which directly conflict with their primary and overriding duties to secure children’s welfare. By entwining social care with immigration, they will corrode trust between social workers and families and communities with roots outside the UK.

The Home Office’s own experiment with removing section 95 support found that this did not lead to an increase in returns. However, it did conclude that “a significant number of families may have absconded from their accommodation because of concerns about the process”.

We therefore believe that the effects of implementing these proposals will include:

• Significant and direct harm to children, young people and families, with immediate increases in homelessness and destitution
• Increases in absconding, putting children and families at risk of criminal and sexual exploitation, modern slavery and other harms
• Reduction in the ability of local authorities to deliver their fundamental duties to keep children safe, with particular impacts on children from minoritised ethnic groups
• Significant downstream costs for local authorities and criminal justice agencies in dealing with these impacts
• No significant impact on removals or returns.

Removing support for care leavers (paragraphs 32-39)

Settle is particularly concerned about the proposals to remove support from young people leaving the care system, the group we work with every day.

We believe these proposals are harmful to young people, contradict the government’s wider policy intent, and will be counterproductive in terms of the Home Office’s aims, leading to increased costs and burdens on public services without increasing returns.

Young people who are seeking asylum are entitled to continued support and protection from the state on leaving care, like every other young person who has been taken into our collective care. Access to support should be based on need, not immigration status.

Worse outcomes for care leavers

Leaving care is a period of heightened risk. According to government data, care leavers are 9 times more likely to experience homelessness than their peers between the ages of 18 and 21. Care-experienced young people are much less likely than their peers to go to university, and much more likely to be not in education, employment or training. They experience higher rates of poverty, ill health, incarceration, and early death.

Young people who came to the UK as unaccompanied asylum-seeking children face significant additional disadvantages, including language barriers and lack of knowledge about their opportunities or entitlements in this country.

From Settle’s experience of working with care leavers who are seeking asylum, these additional barriers exacerbate the risks involved in leaving care. For example, we have worked with a number of young people seeking asylum who were at significantly elevated risk of homelessness, because issues such as debt or tenancy obligations had not been communicated to them in ways they could understand.

We also note that these proposals will not only impact people who are later removed from the UK. Some young people seeking asylum who, under these proposals, could have care leaver support removed, will still go on to be granted leave to remain. This is even more likely now that the scope of the proposals has been broadened to include young people whose appeal rights have not yet been exhausted.

By removing care leaver support from young people seeking asylum during this critical transition, these proposals will only exacerbate the challenges they face and increase their risk of poor life outcomes. Far from removing or restricting support, Settle’s experience shows that this group of young people is in particular need of support when leaving care.

Increased absconding

The harms caused by these proposals will not be limited only to young adults whose asylum claims have not yet been determined.

The young people with experience of seeking asylum who Settle works often have limited understanding of their entitlements or obligations. Communications related to the care system and the asylum system are typically complex and technical, and young people who do not have English as a first language can struggle to understand what is required of them. Settle believes that many young people who fall outside the scope of these proposals will therefore be at risk of absconding, because they do not understand the nuances of these new provisions, and believe themselves to be under threat of removal.

Settle also believes that these proposals will lead to significant negative unintended consequences for unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in care. If threatened with removal into the asylum system, there is a risk that these children will abscond as they approach their 18th birthday. It is almost certain that they will face homelessness, destitution, and criminal and sexual exploitation as a result.

Funding tuition fees for care leavers seeking asylum (paragraph 39)

The proposal to remove funding for tuition fees seems particularly counterproductive, given the barriers that care leavers experience in accessing higher education. The government has rightly recognised that this has a major impact on their life chances, and has committed to take action to address it.

The young people with experience of the asylum system who Settle supports are keen to contribute to the UK, pursuing apprenticeships and further education in order to make a career and a future here. By cutting off young people’s access to university, these proposals will further limit their opportunities for integration and engagement in society, as well as harming their earning potential, future options and life chances.

The policy context

Care leavers’ rights and entitlements to support are enshrined in The Children Act 1989 and a body of subsequent primary legislation, most recently the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026. The Minister for Children and Families described this Act as “a historic moment … giving more young people the best possible start in life”, and ensuring a stronger, more joined up approach to public support for care leavers. These proposals will

instead disconnect young people from support, and will do direct and profound harm to their life chances.

The tragically high rate of early deaths among care leavers represents a profound system failure. The government has recognised this in its recent announcement of a review into care leaver deaths, stating that “The government is determined to change this as part of wider efforts to improve the lives of young people, breaking down barriers to opportunity and enabling them to succeed”.

Removing existing support from young people leaving the care system would leave them even more vulnerable to harm and to premature death.

In May 2025, the white paper Restoring Control over the Immigration System stated that the government “will ensure children who have been in the UK for some time, turn 18 and discover they do not have status, are fully supported and able to regularise their status and settle. This will also include a clear pathway for those children in care and care leavers”. The proposals to remove support from care leavers who are seeking asylum directly contravene the Home Office’s commitments to children and young people, as set out by the Prime Minister at the launch of the Restoring Control white paper.

These proposals fly in the face of the government’s wider policy commitments to children in care, to care leavers and to young people seeking asylum, and Settle does not believe that they should go ahead.

Increased costs to public services

Settle’s experience of working with care leavers with experience of the asylum system tell us that implementing these proposals would significantly increase young people’s risk of homelessness, destitution, criminal and sexual exploitation and even early death.

These outcomes are human tragedies and would undermine the government’s wider commitments to tackling homelessness, poverty and economic inactivity. They will also fuel the illicit economy and contribute directly to increased street / crisis homelessness.

The proposals will therefore generate additional immediate and long-term costs to the public, adding to spending on temporary accommodation, which is already unsustainable, on welfare, on hospitals and mental health services, and on policing and criminal justice.

Disproportionate cost / burden on local authorities

According to the DfE, ~8% of children looked after in England in the year to March 2025 were unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. At 2,000-3,000 a year, the total number of care leavers with experience of the asylum system is not large. Of these, most will already have a determined immigration status. Settle estimates that these proposals will apply to at most a few hundred young people each year – perhaps one or two in any local authority.

With nearly 40,000 returns in the year to March 2026, the young people affected by these proposals represent a tiny proportion.

Nevertheless, each local authority will be required to devote staff time to immigration assessment, compliance and enforcement, with much of this focused on young people who ultimately continue to be entitled to support. The cost of implementing these proposals will vastly outweigh any potential benefit to the Home Office’s returns agenda.

Of course, once children or young people have absconded, they are lost to sight of the asylum and immigration system. Settle therefore believes that these proposals will have the unintended consequence of making it harder for the Home Office to identify and remove young people whose asylum claims are ultimately rejected.

Conclusion

These proposals contravene the government’s stated commitments to young people leaving care, and the wider body of law on care leavers’ rights and entitlements.

Further, the proposals will:

• Cause significant harm to young people who came to the UK as unaccompanied asylum-seeking children, both immediately in terms of homelessness, destitution and exploitation, and to their longer-term life chances
• Increase the likelihood of children in care absconding, with all the associated harms entailed
• Cause these harms not only to young people whose asylum claims are rejected, but to young people who ultimately gain leave to remain, constraining their ability to make a life here and contribute to the UK
• Impose significant additional costs and burdens on local authorities, health services and criminal justice agencies
• Not lead to an increase in removals and returns.

Settle therefore objects to this set of proposals on grounds of principle and practice.

We suggest that the Home Office should pause the current consultation process, and engage with the sector to understand the likely impact of any proposed changes to the care system on young people and the government’s policy agenda. Settle would be happy to work with the Department to share our insight and connect you to the experiences of young people who are seeking asylum, in order to help shape a solution that is fair and effective for all.