Adoption and Fostering (Hansard, 10 March 1998)

§ Mr. Julian Brazier (Canterbury)

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require local authorities, when considering adoption or fostering, to make use of married couples unless they can show that no such couples are available who meet the needs of the child; and for connected purposes. I am grateful to Members of all parties who have agreed to co-sponsor my Bill.

We have a special responsibility to unwanted children. Not only do they have no voice of their own, but it is very sad that any child should be without a loving home. We all read from time to time, with a shudder, of young lives that have been ruined by physical and sexual abuse, drug taking or child prostitution. We are failing the most vulnerable and defenceless members of our community.

Perhaps the worst features are the horrendous statistics associated with children in care—the very children whom the state has taken as its own responsibility. The occasional inquiries into the torture and abuse of children in some children's homes represent only a small part of the total picture. We know, of course, that there are many workers in children's homes who struggle to provide a decent life for some very difficult and damaged children, but the overall statistics for children leaving care are terrible.

A child leaving care is 50 times as likely as a typical youngster of the same age to end up in prison, and far more likely to become a drug addict. Perhaps most shocking is the fact that a quarter of all the girls who have been in care became pregnant while they were in care, and one in seven are pregnant at the point of leaving care. The abuse among boys is at much the same level.

Those evils are passed on to the next generation. We remember the tragic case of Rikki Neave, the six-year-old who was repeatedly beaten, tortured and finally choked to death by his natural mother, herself a graduate of our so-called system of care.

Yet there is one highly underrated institution that serves so many of those children so well: adoption. Studies from the United States, Australia, New Zealand and this country have shown the astonishing success of adoption. Adopted children not only do much better than those in care, which is perhaps to be expected because some of the most damaged children must be kept in care, as no one wants to adopt them; children adopted from care also do very much better than those children from care who are returned to their natural parents.

Perhaps most surprising of all, the studies show that damaged children adopted from care by married couples do better on average than children who have never been in care, who are raised in certain categories of natural family, including those raised in single-parent families headed by a young, never-married mother.

However, adoption has collapsed numerically. From 21,000 adoptions 20 years ago, the figure was down to less than 6,000 last year. I draw the attention of the House to three features of current adoption practice, besides the dramatic fall in the absolute numbers.

First, while most adoptions are still with married couples, there is a growing tendency for some local authorities to place children with individuals who are in other forms of union. There was the celebrated case last 327 year, for example, of the 11-year-old boy whom Southwark sought to place with a homosexual who was in a supposedly stable relationship with another man. What was Southwark trying to achieve?

I believe that we should be tolerant towards adult unions of all sorts, where only adults are concerned, but a child of 11 does not have the mature sexuality that would allow it to make a free choice as to the sort of sexual relationship in which it wants its minders to be involved. Indeed, I do not know whether the child in that case tried to make such a choice. Children must not be allowed to become the pawns of some social workers in the battle that they are fighting for their own social and political agenda.

The institution of marriage, even in this era of divorce, is still an astonishing success. A child born to a married couple has a better than four in five chance that 10 years later its parents will still be together. On the other hand, according to the latest British household panel survey, a child born to a couple who are not married but in an allegedly stable relationship has only a one in five chance of his parents remaining together for 10 years—unless they subsequently marry.

So many married couples who are unable to have their own children would dearly love the opportunity to adopt a child and, in some cases, are willing to adopt very damaged children from the care system. It is sad to hear that such couples are often denied that opportunity. In one case, a mixed race couple were denied the opportunity to adopt a coloured child because social services in the authority concerned considered that they had suffered insufficient racial harassment to provide a good home for the child. What nonsense.

Alongside the practice of placing some children with unmarried individuals in other relationships and imposing unfair restrictions on some married couples who would dearly love to adopt, there is a third feature of adoption that I believe has been insufficiently examined: the financial risk to a family who take on a severely emotionally damaged child from care. I am at present dealing with a constituency case involving a married couple who adopted two girls who had been severely sexually abused. One of the adoptions succeeded, but, sadly, after a long struggle, the couple were forced to relinquish the other girl back into care.

At the time of adoption, the parents were forced to take on the full legal responsibilities that natural parents would assume. That is fair enough when a child is adopted at birth. However, the social services department is pursuing this couple for an enormous bill for the care of the second child, even though the couple have provided a good home for one child and struggled very hard with the other. That hardly seems just.

That brings me to the specific proposals in my Bill. First, local authorities should be required to consider adoption for all children who have been taken into care as a result of being severely physically or sexually abused, putting the interests of the child, not the natural parents, first. Secondly, wherever possible, adoption should be granted to married couples unless it can be shown that no suitable married couple are available.

Thirdly, when adoption is not an option—probably because a child is so damaged that no one can be found to take him on—the alternative should be fostering by a married couple. I do not deny the splendid work done by 328 some individual carers. However, where possible, it is best that fostering should be undertaken by married couples, for the reasons I have outlined.

Fourthly, when children are adopted out of care, the authority should have to sign a financial waiver so that, if an adoption fails and the child returns to care, the parents are not put at financial risk. Finally, the Bill seeks to give the Secretary of State the power to intervene when a local authority fails to follow those rules, and to give that authority's control over adoption to a voluntary agency.

In our country today—

§ Mr. Hilton Dawson (Lancaster and Wyre)

In rising to speak against the Bill, I sincerely congratulate the hon. Member for Canterbury (Mr. Brazier) on at least raising in the House the tremendously important subject of fostering and adoption. I come from a professional background of managing fostering and adoption, and have great sympathy with the hon. Gentleman's genuine, obvious desire to ensure that children in care are given the security, consistency, respect, consideration, guidance and all-round care they need.

I would counsel the hon. Gentleman to reflect on the fact that adoption is not a panacea. It is an over-simplification to say that it can be a solution for all children who have been abused and then come into care. Nor is fostering as an alternative to adoption invariably better than residential care. Many young people, particularly adolescents, make a positive choice for residential care rather than go back into a family.

No adult has a right to be a foster carer or adopter, but, like the hon. Gentleman, I want children in care to be offered excellent placements where they can have good experience of family life that meets their needs and helps them to prepare for the future. I just do not think that the hon. Gentleman's Bill is the way to do it, because, despite what it says, it would run the risk of undoing the Children Act 1989 principle—the good social work practice principle—that the needs of children are paramount. The very act of requiring local authorities to show that no married couples are available who could meet needs means that some aspects of real needs could be compromised to avoid criticism.

Matching children with foster carers or adopters is an extremely complex task, wherein all the growing and developing needs of children from a vast variety of backgrounds, who have often been abused, rejected and neglected, must be matched carefully to the assessed abilities and qualities of prospective carers. It is not an exact science—far from it. It is a matter of delicate and subtle judgment. At its heart, it is about working with human relationships.

In assessing foster carers, it is, of course, vital to gauge the quality and commitment of people's personal relationships, but it seems inappropriate to elevate a couple's marital status so that it could begin to be more important than factors such as whether the prospective carers really have the skills to work with children who have been sexually abused; whether they have the ability to work with birth families; and whether they share a 329 cultural background, which is important, or can tolerate extreme acting-out behaviour. Social work is extremely sensitive, acute—sometimes intuitive—work that does not always fit comfortably within the bureaucracy of local authorities. The Bill would establish another unhelpful rule.

Children in care need flexibility and tolerance. They need to have their views heeded, and sometimes they need very caring people to be prepared to take risks. They do not need the imposition of moral imperatives that are nothing to do with keeping them safe or meeting their individual needs.

In this day and age—let us face it—one does not have to be married, or even be in a relationship, to provide excellent care for children. Indeed, there is evidence that, in some circumstances, one group of much-maligned potential carers—single parents—can have more to offer than couples. Crucially, it may be easier for a child, especially one from a disturbed background, to attach to one new adult rather than two.

Research carried out by Dr. Morag Owen from the university of Sussex and published by the British Agencies for Adoption and Fostering, considered the experience of 48 children who had been adopted by single people. Some of the children felt that it was an advantage to have one parent: the views of two adults did not have to be reconciled, and there was real consistency. Girls who had been sexually abused valued the opportunity to have a one-to-one relationship with a caring woman. The study concluded that, given the needs of children in the care system, single people are often uniquely equipped to parent them.

However, single people are often deterred from coming forward for assessment as foster carers or prospective adopters. We need more placements, particularly for older children with more complex needs and challenging problems. But giving priority to married couples could well mean that even fewer single parents or couples living together would present themselves for what should in any case be the challenging and rigorous process of assessment.

I am concerned about the Bill. It is highly unlikely that it will become law, but were it to do so, it could undermine the chances of some of the most needy children in our society to have a decent childhood. I do not intend to take up the time of the House by pressing the matter to a Division, but I hope that the hon. Gentleman will reflect upon what I have said, and decide not to proceed with the Bill.

330 A Bill which celebrated the rich variety of adoptive and foster placements in Britain, which promoted adoption and fostering as some of the most profoundly important tasks which all sorts of adults in all sorts of relationships and none can undertake, and which offered better training, support and recognition, would be a much better Bill, and that would have my whole-hearted support.