Posted: Thursday 15 December 2011
Response to claim of “unnecessary adoptions”
This week John Hemming, Liberal Democrat MP, is reported to have claimed that up to 1,000 children a year in England are being adopted for the “wrong reasons” and should stay with their families. I could not disagree more with this statement. In response to it, Martin Narey, the Ministerial Advisor on adoption and previously Chief Executive of Barnardos, has pointed out that there were 3,040 adoptions in England last year of which only 1,360 were without the parents’ consent. Mr Hemming’s suggestion is therefore that up to 1,000 of those 1,300 “forced adoptions” were inappropriate.
My experience as a practitioner in the field of Scottish adoption law has been that children will not be removed from the care of their natural parents by their local social work department without a substantial level of neglect or abuse. The present system has many safeguards built into it to protect the natural parents, arguably sometimes at the expense of the child. Where an adoption is opposed, the local authority must go through a series of stringent legal tests before being in a position to satisfy a Sheriff that a Permanence Order should be granted, thus removing the natural parents’ parental rights and responsibilities and allowing the child to be adopted in due course. The system in England, while governed by a different set of legislation and regulations, is similar.
Adoption rates are falling precisely because local authorities are very conscious of the importance of maintaining children in their natural family units as far as possible. While there may of course be the occasional case where the local authority has not acted appropriately, to suggest that up to 1,000 adoptions in England last year were wrongly granted cannot be correct.
For further advice on this subject please contact Rachel Shewan by emailing rachel.shewan@morton-fraser.com or by calling on 0131 247 1258
