Foster carers needed in Lymington
South Coast Fostering is recruiting foster carers in Lymington, Pennington, Boldre, Sway, Milford on Sea, Everton, Hordle and Brockenhurst. Children from Lymington who come into care are placed by Hampshire County Council. New Forest District Council does not run children's social care.
The county was looking after 1,711 children in May 2026. The pool of people willing to take them in keeps shrinking: England had 42,190 fostering households at 31 March 2025, 7 per cent fewer than in 2021, on Ofsted figures published on 26 November 2025.
The New Forest is an awkward place for that trend to land. Its population fell between the last two censuses, from about 176,500 in 2011 to 175,800 in 2021, making it one of only 25 authority areas in the UK to shrink over the decade. Fewer households arriving means fewer replacements for the carers who retire.
Sharron is our supervising social worker for Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, so one person holds both sides of the Solent. She visits at least every four weeks and sees the child at least every eight, and the advice line runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Payments are £479.50 a week for a child aged 0 to 10 and £507.50 for 11 and over, per child. Additional needs placements pay £550 to £850 and a parent and child placement pays £987, with £330 to £1,500 a year towards council tax on top. Most fostering income falls under HMRC's qualifying care relief and is not taxed. Ofsted inspected us in January 2026 and rated us Outstanding in all three judgement areas. Phone 023 8235 2020.
What do you need to be a foster carer?
The bedroom question is blunter here than in most places. A child needs a room of their own and keeps it for as long as they stay. In a district where the median house price in the year to March 2024 was £385,000, and £650,000 inside the national park, a spare room is not a small thing to hand over. Babies are the exception for the first months, since they sleep in a crib next to you, but the room has to be in the plan from the start.
After that it is time. School twice a day, the whole of the summer holidays, appointments that land when the clinic has a slot, and a fair amount of driving in between. Fostering is a full-time role for at least one adult in the household. Some carers keep part-time work going. Very few manage a full week of fixed hours.
The rest is the assessment, which is thorough by design. Your upbringing, your relationships, your money, your health, everyone else under your roof. Referees are called, checks are run, and an assessing social worker writes a report that goes to an independent panel. It takes months. Most people find the process harder to sit through than the fostering that follows.
Support you'll receive from us
- 24/7 support from your supervising social worker
- £507.50 a week in fostering allowance and fees to foster
- Intensive training program to help you be the best you can be
Where are we recruiting?
Lymington and Pennington first, then Boldre, Sway, Brockenhurst, Milford on Sea, Everton, Hordle, New Milton, Barton on Sea, Lyndhurst, Beaulieu, East Boldre and Bransgore.
Get the geography straight before you apply, because it sets the shape of the week. Lymington has two stations, Lymington Town and Lymington Pier, and both sit on a short branch off the main line. Every train out of Lymington stops at Brockenhurst and you change there, whether you are heading for Southampton, Bournemouth or Waterloo. Network Rail’s engineering notices for the branch read like a list of what holds it up: the bridge over the Lymington River, Lymington Viaduct, Lymington Town level crossing. The road version is the A337, west to Christchurch and north east to junction 1 of the M27, with a bus to Southampton through Lyndhurst and Brockenhurst.
Lymington Pier is also the ferry. Wightlink’s crossing to Yarmouth takes around 40 minutes and is the fastest way to get a car across the Solent. We cover the Isle of Wight as well, so for once a carer’s own map and the agency’s map match. If you have a spare bedroom between Milford on Sea and Beaulieu, call 023 8235 2020. Or read the Hampshire fostering page first and see what a week’s fostering allowance actually comes to.
Lymington
Next Steps
Depending on where you are in your fostering journey, we have a few suggested next steps.
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Who is left to foster in an expensive, ageing town
The New Forest has a supply problem that has nothing to do with goodwill. The housing needs assessment written by Iceni Projects in October 2025 and published by the National Park Authority in February 2026 puts the median house price in the district plan area at £385,000 for the year to March 2024, against £287,500 nationally. Inside the national park the median is £650,000 and the lower quartile is £458,750. The affordability ratio for the New Forest in September 2024 was 11.39, where the national figure was 7.71.
Then the age profile. Lymington and Pennington’s neighbourhood plan counted 507 retirement homes already built in the parish, with another 32 under construction. Across the district the local plan projects a 40 per cent rise in residents aged 65 and over between 2016 and 2036, an extra 13,200 people. That projection was made in 2020, so handle the exact number with care. The direction is not in doubt.
Put those together and you get a town where most of the households with a spare bedroom are past the age of wanting a nine-year-old in it, while the households in their thirties and forties are the ones the mortgage has stretched hardest. That is the recruiting problem in Lymington, stated plainly. It is not indifference. It is arithmetic.
The same assessment treats second homes and short-term lets as a constraint on housing supply across the district, while Lymington’s own neighbourhood plan argues the town suffers less from empty off-season property than comparable coastal towns. Both can be right. One is district-wide and recent, the other is town-specific and older.
None of this stops the town working. Lymington is one of the New Forest’s six market towns, with Totton, Hythe, New Milton, Ringwood and Fordingbridge, and it has kept its Georgian and Victorian streets and the narrow cobbled lanes by the quay. It built boats and made salt long before it sold moorings.
Children from here still come into care and Hampshire still has to place them somewhere. If nobody in Pennington has a room, the child goes to Southampton or further. If somebody does, they keep the school bus. Call 023 8235 2020.
book a call about fostering:
We’d be happy to give you a 15-20 minute call to tell you about fostering. Don’t worry, there’s no pressure from us – it’s honestly a chance for you to ask us any questions you have about fostering, and your suitability. Just complete this short form
