Daily Mail

The changing face of adoption

- By Steve Doughty Social Affairs Correspond­ent

RACE laws to prevent white parents adopting ethnic minority children crept into the rulebooks used by social workers and adoption societies in the Eighties.

Adoption became deeply unfashiona­ble among social work chiefs, one of whom remarked in the Nineties: ‘It is society itself that has decided it no longer wants to see babies farmed out to middle-class mothers.’

Social workers tried to match children with parents of precisely the same racial background, in one case calling for Algerian-Irish couples for a child of Algerian and Irish natural parents. Adop- tion rates improved after 2000, when Tony Blair said children in state care had little chance of a decent life and the best option was to find a new family.

David Cameron’s government insisted no adoption should be halted just because of attempts to racially match child and adoptive parents. The 2011 rules were pushed through by then Education Secretary Michael Gove, who was himself adopted.

Support for transracia­l adoption has been widespread. In a landmark case in 2015, appeal judges overruled social workers who claimed two black boys should not be brought up by white parents, saying the adoption should go ahead.

The former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips, said when he stepped down in 2012 that ‘if I had ordered an inquiry it would have shown clearly that the life chances of children are much, much better in a family of any race’.

He added: ‘My regret is that hundreds of children, maybe thousands of children, would now be in families, but got stuck in the care system.’

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from United Kingdom