So according to Cameron and the invisible and highly reticent Edward Timpson (Minister for Children apparently though you would not think so) the reason why many potential parents don’t adopt is because adoption gets bad press. Not for a moment have they considered that the bad press is warranted. It is not a case of people being fed lies; mostly it is that those who might know anything about adoption, know that there is no support for families once you have adopted. The subset of the population who might consider adopting are generally a well-informed lot: they know that once you take on the responsibility of a child who has been in the care system you get a sack load of trauma and neglect but not tools to help you deal with it. Kids in care suffer twice (at least), first from biological parents who can’t look after them or don’t want them. They’re already messed up but the care system then shunts them around and makes sure they’re well and truly feeling the pain of neglect.
Love is not enough for these kids. For someone adopted as a baby it may be ok but the reality is that most kids will be toddlers at least, before they are adopted. They will have felt abuse, emotional and physical pain and much more besides. They will need specialist care to either prevent them developing a form of mental illness or to treat it . But they won’t get it. Almost to the day that parents and children come together to form a family, they will be left alone. Local authorities and councils, happy to pass the parcel, will cross them off their list.

This example  is typical of how well-meaning people end up exhausted after fighting for years to get post-adoption support for their kids. Most never secure funding for the therapy that’s needed and it is not uncommon for them to return the child to care because they are unable to cope.

“Our son, who we’ve had since he was two, at age nine became incredibly aggressive and clearly has behavioural problems. “Now he’s a nearly 16-year-old who’s over 20 stone, and I’ve been pinned against the wall and my head smashed in. I regularly would get hit,and his mouth is like a sewer. I love him to bits, but I wouldn’t say I’m very proud of him. We’ve been close many times to picking up the phone and saying ‘we can’t do this’.”

While social workers may reassure parents during the adoption process that they have the right to an assessment of a child’s needs, they may not explicitly communicate that there is no duty on a local authority to provide the services to meet any needs that are identified. And because no statutory agency has any obligation to stump up, all too often, they don’t.

And so we come back again to one of the central platforms for Adopt a Better Way: the lack of a central regulating body. Without it we have no exact data as to how many children are returned to care as a result of lack of support. how many children develop mental illness during their first years in care and what is needed to minimise this awful chain of events. initiatives such as the ill-thought out adoption passport do not attempt to address key issues including how to monitor the performance of councils or how to move towards a structure that supports children and parents so they can come together and stay together. But with such a reductive government in power, one who talks a great deal about families but whose policies are almost resolutely anti-family, it is hard to see how this will happen.

A crisis situation like the one affecting about 70,000 children in this country necessitates way more than a guideline here and a passport there. It requires a serious overhaul of a system that is inefficient, out of date and fundamentally not developed with the child’s interest in mind. The whole process needs confidence in it and around it and right now, a flimsy passport isn’t going to do this.

Children’s Minister Edward Timpson said: “For too long children have been left waiting – in many cases over two years – for the stable, loving homes whilst prospective adopters have been dissuaded from offering those children the security they need.” The issue is, Mr Timpson, the passport does not even attempt to address the fact that children wait too long. To do so would require tackling the enormous weight of overly bureaucratic processes, the inefficiencies of the Family Courts and the lack of consistency between them and social services.
Most importantly, the Government has completely ignored the need for a regulator which would ensure a smoother process for children who languish in care for years. Until the Government does not seriously take responsibility to address this, we will not see the step change we have been promised for years now. Meanwhile we continue wasting time and lives. But then again Mr Timpson hasn’t even got time to meet with me, so what do I expect.

You probably know what’s coming next: what they uncover is heartbreaking and frustrating as they experience what many adoptive and would be adoptive parents have found – a system that works against the interests of the children. Apparently Sir Elton John and David have provided a great deal of input into the feature, so my delight at being contacted was pretty much off the scale. They sent a film crew from the States to record my experiences of adopting from Mexico. I had to keep pinching myself to believe  it was true!

It’s gratifying that my campaign group, Adoption With Humanity, has been recognised amongst global adoption campaigning groups  for its emphasis on the plight of the thousands of children in the UK forgotten in care. Though I’m no less frustrated at the situation we’re in with adoption, it’s very encouraging to know that many of you share our views and understand the need to make the adoption process leaner and more child-centric.

Launched in the US this coming September, the film will be shown here in the UK just before National Adoption Week. I have huge hopes about its potential as a catalyst for change. Filming with Olga and dealing with her and her colleague Mike Dudko was an amazing experience and their commitment to giving children a voice is real and will hopefully go a long way. I felt like I had known them both for ages. We share the same views and dreams. Dreams it is worth waking up to every day for.

Sadly this is pretty much how governments have conducted themselves in dealing with pressing issues in both the adoption process and the care system which is a part of it. Sure there has been much murmuring from Michael Gove and Tim Loughton about making ‘big changes’ to the process. The former is himself adopted so I guess I’d hoped for more action but instead, we just get more pronouncements.

So I sit here looking at the same disturbing facts over and over. Black and Asian children find it hard to be adopted into a permanent, stable home. The numbers of children going into care are also increasing  - on average around 1000 each month. Meanwhile there are prospective parents coming forward, many of them ready to jump through the countless hoops that will be put before them. And we have a society that embraces alternative concepts of creating a family, one where even surrogacy is becoming more accepted. So why is adoption so complicated, so bureaucratic, so uncaring and unaware of the people it affects the most? Why isn’t it a leaner, more transparent process that gives hope instead of discouraging those who want to make it work?

The reality is that in nearly four years the government hasn’t even attempted to alter the the forms on the Home Study questionnaire to ask if parents would consider a child of a different race.

You know, I receive calls each day from people desperate to open their hearts to a child who needs a loving home. These people tell me they have been turned down as adoptive parents due to race. I find that even more troubling in a country that spends a fortune on ensuring ‘diversity’ in its workplaces. The number of children adopted last year was the lowest in ten years and England lags behind any other so called ‘developed’ country when it comes to the way it handles the children left to languish in care. Their lives are destroyed before they have a chance to begin. And still the government sits there, intellectually and morally constipated uttering passive words. Non-announcements are not only depressing, they are insulting to the children and those of us who care about making life better for them.

Adoption with Humanity welcomes the new action plan. However, we continue to believe that sadly this will not make the changes necessary to improve the adoption system and assert the best interests of children. The reason remains the same – there still isn’t the appropriate regulatory authority to ensure that the government will be able to achieve the Minister’s stated goal “to accelerate the whole adoption process so that more children benefit from adoption and more rapidly”.

Far too much slack is given to local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies to achieve standards that they had already been expected (and failed) to meet for seven years. There is a role to help manage local family courts for the Family Justice Board at national level and the Local Family Justice Operational Boards – but the “elephant in the room” is that the courts and the adoption agencies are working to completely different and opposed laws and no effort has been made to align them. In addition, there is no integrated structure to ensure that sanctions can be taken to minimise and moderate the effects of failure.

Evidence is continuing to come to light about the failures of the current system – most recently the scandal of the unreliability of professional expert witnesses in family courts, and the excessive reliance that judges place on their reports, which has been described as “staggeringly wrong”.
Please read the article below, “How competent are expert witnesses?”

We maintain that the need for an adoption regulator, with regulatory investigatory and enforcement powers to meet statutory objectives set by the government, is only increasing.

The rationale for an integrated national adoption regulator in England and Wales is based on four primary considerations:
▪   The advantage of having a single regulator which is clearly accountable for its performance against statutory objectives, including:
-          the development of regulations
-          the investigation of the application of regulations
-          the enforcement of regulations
-          sanctions to be applied for the failure to abide by regulation.
▪   To ensure that regulation is consistent with the results of research and best practice world wide.
▪   To take advantage of economies of scale and scope and to add value by being able to allocate scarce regulatory resources efficiently and effectively.
▪   To take advantage of the benefits of being able to resolve the various interest groups and differing philosophies in one integrated authority.

These considerations explain why Adoption with Humanity continues to call for the Government to reassess the situation and set up a National Adoption Authority to act as an integrated national adoption regulator. The Government’s Action Plan for Adoption is doomed to failure and too much time will be wasted on allowing this to happen – and in the meanwhile it is the children who will pay the price.

The government has today announced some changes to the prospective adopter assessment process. Adoption With Humanity applauds this as a long overdue procedure they have been requesting for quite some time, and we are sure that this will have a positive impact on the problems in the adoption system.

However, the group feels the need to raise a note of caution. Simply reforming the forms and some of the structure of the home study is not enough. With the new forms will come a significant need for training current workers and those still in education. Moreover, there will need to be put in place some authoritative person or organisation to ensure the quality of that work and the subsequent usage of the forms, so that individual preferences and views are not allowed to override the government’s policy.

“You can’t just rejig the paperwork or the Home Study and say you’ve made changes,” said Francesca Polini. “I am pleased that the government is trying to do something about the dire state of the adoption process but really it’s just not enough.”

She reiterates her call for a National Adoption Authority to oversee the work currently done by social workers and local councils.

“There is no point saying things have to change but not putting the necessary mechanism in place. If we had a National Adoption Authority then those responsible for carrying out the work would be answerable to that authority and would be required to justify their working practices. Only then would the government’s changes actually mean anything and not be overridden by individual preferences.”

She points out that the government’s recent change in its stated policy regarding trans-racial adoption is not reflected in the current paperwork. Neither, she says, has the National Adoption Register. “Even if social workers wanted to, they would not be able to find prospective trans-racial adopters.” as the necessary data simply is not recorded.

Francesca believes that unless there is a statutory authority to reinforce the government’s wishes and to monitor the work done by those involved in adoption, then nothing will really change. This type of blocking of the government’s policies, deliberate or inadvertent, cannot be allowed to continue. Every effort must now be made to ensure that the new reforms are properly instituted and then monitored by some form of statutory regulation with the power to ensure that efficacy and quality is maintained … a National Adoption Authority perhaps?

For Francesca Polini and her husband, Rick, the process was heartbreaking. They deliberately chose not to have children of their own, but instead to offer a home to a couple of children in care waiting to be adopted.
Mrs Polini was taken aback when social workers at Ealing council in West London, where she lives, told her that their services were not required.

“I was told over the phone, without even an interview or face-to-face meeting, that all the children in Ealing needing to be adopted were black or mixed-race and there was a cap on the number of white couples they wanted to approve, and that number had been reached,” she told The Times.

“I was really shocked. It was made clear we could not be considered for anyone other than a white child, and there was no suggestion that neighbouring local authorities may need white couples and I should go there instead. The social worker suggested we try for overseas adoption instead. Apparently it didn’t matter about the child being from a different ethnic group as long as it came from abroad.”

The couple did just that, and after an emotional rollercoaster ride became the first British couple to adopt from Mexico. Mrs Polini, 41, has written a book, Mexican Takeaway, about the experience. They have a daughter, Gaia, 3, and a son Luca, aged six months.

Although they are happy with their family, they still feel they had a lot to offer children in care in this country.

“It didn’t hit me until after we had adopted Gaia how ridiculous it is to tell a couple they cannot adopt because they are white. With local authorities it seems to be colour first, and then what religion your are, rather than whether you are ready and prepared to look after a child.

“The Government has made a start with new guidance but it remains to be seen whether local authorities will follow it. I think there won’t be any significant progress unless they scrap the local authority-based system altogether and have one national agency in charge.”

I would like to say a heartfelt ‘thank you’ to The Times for the tremendous support they are giving to help young children find loving and stable homes.