Prime Minister considering law change to speed up the adoption process

In a speech on adoption today, education secretary Michael Gove said that local authorities are still blocking adoptions for children in care with adoptive parents from different racial backgrounds. A black child in care is three times less likely to be adopted than a white child.

Mr Gove said that despite issuing guidance to councils last year on this issue, there was evidence to suggest that they had failed to change their practice.

During a question and answer session afterwards, the education secretary said that some local authorities still had policies on their websites that put ethnicity ahead of other factors that are more important in the interests of the child.

‘The inflexible application of rigid rules prevent children being placed with loving families. And all things being equal I would rather a child was placed more quickly and the parents were assessed much more rapidly in order to make sure children don’t languish in care,’ he said.

‘We will be legislating. The decision is ultimately the Prime Minister’s and there are a range of options he is looking at, but he is clear that while there has been an improvement and the guidance has helped, there hasn’t been a big enough improvement.’

Mr Gove, who will launch the Adoption Action Plan in the next few weeks, also said that flaws in the assessment system for adoption, with excessive bureaucracy and form-filling, are putting off would-be adoptive parents and leading to unnecessary delays.

Adoption has fallen by 17 per cent over the last ten years. Mr Gove – who was himself adopted at four-months-old – said that the average time between a child entering the care system and being adopted was now over two-and-a-half years.

There are too many examples of the assessment system going wrong for prospective adopters, who feel that the current system is driving them away, he added.

‘The current system of assessment has become bloated. Assessments regularly run to over 100 pages. They include huge areas of repetition and an astonishing amount of trivial detail, which seems to bear dubious relevance to adults' capacity to be loving parents,’ he said.

‘Highly trained social workers spend hours asking questions like whether there is a non-slip mat in the shower, whether the prospective adopters have a trampoline in the garden and, if so, whether it has a safety net.

‘A three page pet assessment form has been extended by one voluntary organisation to include a six page dog assessment – nine pages of forms to manage the risk of an adopted child living with a pet.

‘The quantity of material gathered has been confused with the quality of analysis – and there is no direct correlation between the two.’

Anne Longfield, chief executive of 4Children, said, ‘Anything that can make the adoption process faster and simpler will clearly benefit the record number of children going through the care system. 

‘Though there is a difficult balance to strike between safeguarding, helping families to stay together, and taking decisive action, hurdles to the process of adoption are often against the best interests of children.

‘Adoption tends to be a consequence of family breakdown and crisis. The Government must focus on early intervention and provide more support to prevent family breakdown in the first place.’