I had 89 brothers and sisters – which is why I’m going to free children from the adoption mire
ONE of my strongest childhood memories is arriving home from school, aged five or six, to discover two small children running amok around the house.
When my mother told me they’d be staying with us for a while, I fled to my bedroom and slammed the door, vowing not to come out until they were gone.
Over the next few hours, I got used to the idea and came out of my room. I’m the youngest of three children and with my father out at work all day and the children at school, my mother needed to fill the void. She’d been a nursery nurse and nanny and decided she needed something to occupy her time. She answered an advert for foster carers – hence the children running around our home. They were just the first. Over the years, I’ve had 89 ‘brothers and sisters’, including the two boys my parents subsequently adopted.
I always say that I became a grandfather long before becoming a father to my own three children. Aged nine, I was bottle-feeding and changing nappies; my resentment long gone. As I grew older and understood more, I came to treasure seeing sometimes troubled children pass through our home and watching them grow.
The experiences were not all happy. Some youngsters had endured a chaotic start to their lives, were very difficult and put a lot of strain on our family. But overall, it was incredibly rewarding. Some of the children were emergency placements, taken out of danger and put with us for periods of a few days to a few months.
Today, more than 30 years after those first two youngsters put my nose out of joint, I still value the insight my mother’s urge to care for the vulnerable has given me into the lives of children.
Her vocation was the impetus that led me to train as a barrister in the family courts, representing children in council care. When I entered Parliament, I made it my mission to introduce reforms to the adoption system – measures I believe will command cross-party support.
At the moment, Britain’s adoption system is a national crisis. There are currently 4,600 children who have cleared all the legal stages for adoption but are still in local authority care awaiting families – a process that takes, on average, two years seven months. Yet we know that in some areas, prospective adopters are being ignored or turned away by their local authorities. Many give up, or are forced to adopt abroad.
We urgently need 2,000 to 3,000 adoptive parents to clear the backlog, as well as another 400 to 600 a year for the children coming through the system. That’s why I have set out a series of measures that will simplify the entire process, free up the ‘market’ in adoption and put an end to the current situation where some areas have children waiting for families, while other local authorities turn away prospective parents.
I know from my own experience and from research that the current adoption process is cumbersome and inefficient. We will maintain the necessary checks and safeguards, but end the over-emphasis on finding a perfect ethnic match between child and adoptive parents. Yes, a child’s ethnicity and religion are important, but it is not acceptable that it takes black children, on average, a year longer to find adoptive families.
We know from our research that many prospective parents are put off by adoption agencies’ intrusive and often irrelevant checks. Last week, we heard of a couple who were asked what company their car was insured with – what effect can that have on their suitability to adopt? No longer should people fear being turned away because, for example, they are smokers, or overweight.
We are introducing a National Adoption Gateway to streamline the current system of more than 180 adoption authorities. Our research tells us that 30 per cent of people who apply to adopt currently receive no response within three months. We will ensure that they are called back within 24 hours and visited within a week.
The Government will i nvest £150 million into making the new system work. A third of that money will be ring-fenced to solve two problems. The first is finding homes for hard-to-place children, who might be older children, sibling groups or youngsters with disabilities. The second is the anomaly that forces councils to pay £13,000 to other local authorities who find suitable parents and £27,000 to adoption agencies run by the charitable sector.
There are many excellent councils, but adoption is too patchy. Some authorities are very efficient and join with their neighbours to provide a regional solution. But too many make life difficult for prospective adopters. That’s why, if they fail to improve, we’ll pass their responsibility for adoption to outside agencies run by the voluntary sector. We want the approval process to be cut from the current two years to six months from the moment prospective adopters register their interest. We’re also going to allow adoptive parents to see the adoption register so they can decide for themselves whether they could be suitable parents for a specific child. And to help make more adoptions succeed, we’re increasing support for adoptive parents – for instance by offering the same maternity leave as for natural parents.
I want to make it easier for people from all walks of life to foster and adopt because I’ve seen the good it can do. When I’m in my Crewe and Nantwich constituency, I can’t escape my family’s fostering legacy. I was out knocking on doors when a car slowed and a window opened. ‘Oh no,’ I thought, ‘ here comes an egg.’ Instead, a head poked out and said: ‘Hello Edward.’ It was one of my ‘brothers’ with his new family. At a public meeting, a man approached me and said: ‘You won’t remember me. I’m the one who accidentally smashed your fish tank.’ How could I ever forget?
I’ve seen the difference my mother made to the children she fostered. To this day she maintains an open-door policy to those she helped. Some seek her out in times of trouble because she gave them the only stable period in their childhood. Others have never been in touch – often for the best of reasons: they have grown up, settled down and now have jobs, homes and children of their own. Some of the endings have not been so happy. But I know, and they know, that she provided them with love, care and stability for at least a part of their lives.
We owe it to children in care, the most fragile and vulnerable members of our society, to give them the same opportunity.
Prospective parents are put off by the intrusive checks