There's something fishy here
Topic: Stigma, Throughcare and aftercare, Voices of young people, Financial Insecurity
Author: Adam Bennett
Having lived in Scotland’s care system and spent all of my working life trying to change it, I've written my fair share of serious and unserious pieces about the policies and decisions that shape the lives of care experienced people. What I didn't expect was that an unreasonably long, frankly self-indulgent ‘working paper’ about Scotland’s Care Leaver Payment and smoked salmon would attract quite so much attention.
The idea came from an awkward place. In my own writing, and through ProjectChange, the charity I founded with other care experienced people, I've often used humour to make serious points about the care system. But I worried people might read it all and think: ‘Ah yes, the boy can be funny, but does he know that real change is harder than satire?’ So I thought, what could be less funny than pseudo-academia? Literally nothing.
I appreciate academics. I’m just not inclined to be one, and this piece wasn’t an attempt to step on their toes. Three years on a PhD might qualify as a crime against me under the Geneva Conventions.
Why nearly 6,000 words about smoked salmon? It started with a story from a dear friend.
As a young woman living in supported accommodation, she used her weekly food budget, part of that support, to buy smoked salmon. Some of the staff were taken aback. The charge was that she should have made the money stretch: value tins, the reduced aisle, no deliberate decadence.
It sounds silly because it is. But the judgement underneath it was not silly at all. Money intended to keep her alive was apparently not allowed to make life enjoyable. The very system meant to support her had turned a packet of salmon into a judgement about the sort of person she was allowed to be. Had anyone considered whether the budget itself was too small?
Reading the Scottish Government’s Care Leaver Payment consultation, I recognised that judgement again. Here was £2,000 intended to help young people into independence, and alongside the welcome came assumptions about whether they could be trusted with it.
Side note - I called my opinion piece a working paper because it didn’t feel finished. This was our first real attempt at interrogating the system in Scotland in this much detail, and I wanted to leave room for people to challenge the argument and show us what we’d missed.
That’s why I wrote the paper. I wanted to understand why that suspicion kept surviving inside attempts to help. So, I put the concerns in Scotland around the Care Leaver Payment beside the evidence from the Welsh Government’s Basic Income for Care Leavers in Wales pilot and asked what had happened when young people received the money -and what professionals counted as spending it well. Who gets to be ordinary, and who gets put in the panopticon? A nod here to the great Scottish novelist and poet Jenni Fagan.
Then came the bit that stopped me in my tracks. One response to the Scottish Government consultation warned there would be:
“Nothing to show for the money once it is spent.”
The consultation took place in 2023–24. In the Welsh evaluation of the pilot published in February 2026, a personal adviser described recipients as having done “something good with it, or they've literally got nothing to show for it.”
That evaluation appeared in the same year Scotland's payment came into force, on 1 April 2026, a few months ago. The Welsh comment came from interviews conducted in 2025, after recipients had received a basic income for two years.
Different schemes, different sums, but that same phrase: “nothing to show for it”. What counts as something? Does a less miserable week count? Does getting to choose? Think back to my friend’s smoked salmon. Once she’d eaten it, did that make it worthless?
What is the money for, anyway? Wages help a young person live their life. A care leaver payment recognises that they may be doing so without the family support other young people can count on.
Both put money in their pocket.
Yet only one seems to invite a public debate about whether they can be trusted with it. Imagine the Daily Mail if the council demanded little Timothy explain what he had to show for his Saturday wages from the local farm shop. Apparently, independence is admirable until the state helps you afford it.
The Welsh findings were mixed. Young people described greater freedom and confidence; there were also difficulties managing money and professional reports of harm. The evaluation is still underway. A regular income cannot tell us exactly what a one-off grant will do. But those accounts challenge the assumption that suspicion is simply common sense.
Reading the responses, I kept finding accusations, assumptions and best wishes wrapped up together. Some of it stank of stigma, whether the person writing it meant it that way or not. I wanted to get beyond the essay we've all marked a hundred times: stigma is bad. We know stigma is bad. It's so obvious someone has probably put it on a tote bag. If not, dibs.
The harder question is how it survives inside things intended to help. In the raised eyebrow. In the assumption that pleasure needs defending. In the idea that a young person's spending must leave something a professional can approve of.
My friend’s salmon story is twenty years old. The Welsh report was published this year. Scotland’s payment is now live.
We have changed the policies. Have we changed what we expect of the people whose lives are affected by them?
And doesn’t that alarm you?
Read Please Pass the Smoked Salmon
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