“People always talk about people from state schools that go to Cambridge, but, being homeless and going to Cambridge made me feel quite like a fish out of water.” Indeed.

On paper, Poppy Noor’s story is extraordinary. With a difficult family background, her domestic situation eventually escalated to the stage where it was no longer safe for her to stay at home. At the age of 16, Noor was on the streets.

“I’m keen not to make it a sob story,” she tells me in our email exchange before our interview. And in fact, looking at her now, there doesn’t seem much to sob about. Despite her precarious home situation, Noor managed to get a place to read PPS at Trinity College, matriculating in 2009.

She is part of the six per cent of young people in care who make it to university. She now works in local government in London, but has recently been thrown into the spotlight, and has appeared on Channel 4 News flooring the Conservative MP Nigel Mills in a debate about benefits. Noor was invited onto the show after she wrote a column for the Guardian in which she blasts the government’s planned cuts to benefits for the under-25s, benefits that Poppy depended on during her sixth form years.

“I was just annoyed,” Noor says, “I was listening to [people on the radio] argue about Benefits Street and the like, and I just felt really angry that this was the level of debate, [about] whether or not people had Sky boxes. I just thought that it was so stupid that that was what people were talking about instead of how much [welfare] costs, or how many people are on benefits, or what their ultimate plan is.”

“I feel like there needs to be a concrete definition of where we’re going, because that’s when you get an idea of what people actually believe in.
“If people think that we’re going towards having no welfare state, they’d probably feel differently about cuts than if they think we’re just trying to make work pay or if we’re just trying to help people get jobs, or whatever.”

Noor also sees a problem in apathy of the young people, largely thanks to a feeling of powerlessness: “People in my position don’t really end up interested in politics very often, and I don’t think they often end up having the tools to be able to argue their case, I feel like they’re often ignored”.

Certainly, Noor is not one to be ignored, not to accept powerlessness. This is not the first time she has spoken out on behalf of her often seemingly voiceless generation. While at Cambridge, she vigourously lobbied – much to her tutor’s concern about her studies – for the government to change their policy on youth homelessness. As it stood, if, while being housed by the council you moved out of your borough, for example to go to university, you would be made homeless again.

This is just one of the many deterrents that Noor and her friends from the hostels she spent her final teenage years in faced when it came to applying to university. Low expectations are part of the problem, she says, arguing that the government should be “celebrating and supporting and encouraging people from hostels who get into university or want to go to university”.

Council workers, although there to help, aren’t always particularly encouraging. “I just think the assumption is always there, that if you’re lucky you’ll get a job at Sainsbury’s, and if you’re not lucky you’ll get HIV, so someone better tell you to use a condom.”

By this measure, Noor was more than lucky. However, to attribute her success to mere luck would belittle her tangible hard work, and the help she received along the way. She realises that she is an exceptional case, and that Cambridge made the difference. “Even for me, it was a big decision to go to university,” she admits, “because you’re giving up all of your security when you come back, and it’s really scary, the idea of not having somewhere to go when you come back.

“I mean, in the end, after I went to visit Trinity, I just thought I’d be really stupid if I decided not to go, but I don’t know if I would’ve gone if I’d got in somewhere else.”

She worries that the rarity of cases like hers means that there is a lack of pressure to improve the support available. A rebuttal she often faced while lobbying was, she tells me, “Oh, well you know there aren’t really people in your situation, it’s a rare situation.”

Suffice to say life at Cambridge hardly amounts to a typical student experience, but government and university grants made sure that Noor was able to at least enjoy largely the same lifestyle as her peers.

As well as accommodating her in the holidays, Trinity ensured that the smaller aspects of student life were covered as well. She suggests that the college was “so nervous that I would ever feel left out because of money, that if anything probably went the opposite way”, and notes that her tutors would pay for dental appointments, prescriptions – “they paid for me to do everything.” Noor adds that if she were at another university, she probably wouldn’t have been able to do lots of the things other students did.

Now, free from a critical dependency on government support, Noor is able to express a more philosophical attitude to benefits. In particular, she is wary of the rhetoric that dominates public debate: “I think that a lot of the time, people talk about the benefits trap, which is a real thing, and is a really important thing.

“But people seem to think that the fact that we have…a system of benefits that traps people means that we should cut benefits. Which is not true. We have system of benefits that traps people because jobs don’t pay enough, because we subsidise businesses by not paying enough, rents are massively high, there’s inflation and wages aren’t going up.

She continues: “I’m not sure whether I believe in [the idea] that getting rid of the thing that means that you have something to live on when you’re unwell, or out of work, or you’ve lost your job, is a way to deal with the fact that people don’t have money to live.”

However, with regards to the increasingly successful Cambridge Living Wage campaign, with King’s College becoming the latest college to commit to paying the living wage to all its staff, Noor is wary of overly simplifying the matter. “I feel like it’s not an isolated thing,” she tells me. “What’s the point in paying two pounds extra an hour in a climate where people can’t afford to rent a place? I don’t think that colleges paying the living wage is going to deal with the fact that we’ve massively subsidised businesses in our fucking welfare budget.”

Poppy Noor is a remarkable character, to say the least. While she was once a homeless sixteen-year-old fish out of water, she is now making waves out in the real world. However do not forget that she is a triumph of the welfare state: dismantle it at your peril.