‘We’re not too old to look after our granddaughter’

Grandparents accuse council of ageism after social workers take girl for adoption

‘They considered our age to be too old … I’m not old and decrepit, I’m quite fit and so is my wife’

A COUPLE claim their three-year-old granddaughter was placed for adoption because they were deemed too old to look after her, even though the grandmother is still in her fifties.

The couple, from Southend-on-Sea, Essex, have turned to an internet campaign to gather support for their efforts to overturn an order allowing the girl, whose mother is unable to care for her for health reasons, to be adopted.

They claim their age – the wife is 58 and still works and the husband turned 70 a few months ago – was used against them at a family court hearing last month. They were also unable to hire a lawyer to help fight the ruling following legal aid cuts.

The local authority, Southend-onSea borough council, insisted that age was not the reason it opposed placing the girl with her grandparents and that the decision was taken for the girl’s welfare.

The case tween the government-led drive to increase the number of children being adopted and a desire to keep children within their families wherever possible through arrangements such as kinship care.

Adoption numbers, which surged following the drive initiated by Michael Gove as education secretary, collapsed last year after the most senior family judge in England and Wales criticised rushed and “sloppy” decision-making amid pressure to meet targets.

Sir James Munby, president of the Family Division, later warned social workers not to “shy away” from putting children up for adoption and said wel- fare considerations were being put at risk by a new obsession with keeping them within their wider family circle “at all costs” if their parents could not care for them.

In this case, the couple’s daughter, who is in her early thirties, was taken into hospital suffering from severe depression in January. She later gave her consent to her daughter being placed with foster parents, but the grandparents believe this was not her wish.

“I think she was just resigned to it all and signed it,” the grandfather said.

He said his grandaughter had come to them after her mother went into hospital. A week later a social worker collected her, saying she was taking the girl to allow the couple a few weeks’ respite. But shortly then a social worker came to collect the girl’s clothes as she was to go into foster care.

“We didn’t know what was going on, but they’d applied for a court order with a view to adoption,” the grandfather said. The couple attended a hearing last month where they applied for an order handing them parental responsibility but were refused.

“They considered our age to be too old,” the husband said in another interview. “I’m not old and decrepit, I’m quite fit and so is my wife. We looked after her on several occasions before, she used to come here every week, there were no problems at all.”

They are now receiving support pro bono from Karina Chetwynd, of John Copland and Son in Sheerness, Kent.

Anne Jones, Southend’s executive councillor for children and learning, said: “While we cannot comment upon individual cases, we should highlight that age is not the deciding factor.”