As ever the topic of interracial adoption is a complex one, one that makes the headlines in the New York Times on the same day – link here.

I think the title of the NY Time summarises the whole thing correctly. Yes race (and indeed religion) do matter. They are part of a child’s identity, and it will stay way into adulthood. In an ideal world therefore we would want to match a child with the same ethnicity and why not religion parents. But guess what? We don’t live in that ideal world. We live in one where that choice isn’t always possible and the alternative to that ‘perfect match’ is a life in care shunted around the foster care system with multiple placements (in the majority of cases with temporary carers of a different ethnicity and religion anyway).

After that? The prospects are bleak. Crime, prostitution and homelessness are too often the only future for young adults leaving care as pointed out in our report from last year. 

To say that I found Nick Ferrari obnoxious in the interview would be an underestimation of my actual feelings towards him. Apparently he is amazed that I trust social services to be the ones to be making the right decision in the interest of the child. Who else would be? The birth family who had a total of three children removed from their custody and given for adoption?

In his biased view it should have been taken into account that four sets relatives of the biological mother came forward to adopt, and on top of that they were Muslim. How perfect blood related and same religion.

Should that have been a decisive factor? Being of a specific religion or even ‘blood related’ does not make anyone suitable to adopt.

Worse so Nick and a lot of the press around this specific case were clearly making a point that ‘on top of that’ the white women were lesbians too. So let’s throw everything in the pot why not?

This is going to get really boringly cliché now. What children need is the permanent love of doting parents. When that is provided by biological same ethnicity and religion parents that is great. When that is not possible then the next best available match has to be found to ensure the best interest of the child in paramount. In that case, dare I say like mine with two Mexican children, cultural needs of children can be met by different-race parents who are committed to the best interests of their child.

So that children are not made to pay for having been born in a family which for whatever reason couldn’t provide for them (in this case mental illness) and then for being of the wrong skin colour and or religion.

Being left behind languishing in a care system waiting endlessly not just for ‘a’ muslim family but ‘the right’ muslim family will never be the right alternative to a permanent loving family. Now.

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.

I don’t think we’re any way towards meeting the problem with the reforms it needs. In conversations with both Martin Narey (newly appointed Adoption Czar) and Tim Loughton, the Minister for Children I was impressed with the way both men understood the problem. And I think their intentions are there. However I am not convinced that they are going to generate any substantial mileage in terms of really making any difference – the kind of difference that will change the appalling statistic that out of 4000 children up for adoption in 2010, less than 300 were adopted.

Why is this the case? Again I am loathe to apportion blame on social workers and local authorities as they are merely instruments of the system. It must be said they have used that to make not wholly safe judgements that have tended to be in the interest of keeping families together, rather than finding care and safety for the child. It is the DfE and the government who need to be more accountable though, for their parts in this immoral and often, inhumane circus.

We live in cash strapped times. Councils have always known they can save money, rather a lot of money, by keeping children in care instead of helping them towards adoption. This is going to exacerbate the situation. Sure you can save yourself a bit of money in the short term. And when those neglected kids fail to complete school and end up in prison then what? Because the statistics show us what happens and David Cameron knows it too.

A government that won’t take responsibility for something so fundamental to the well being of children and society is not behaving like a government Government. What we want to see is the government using its weight to enforce any measures with  Local Authorities, Social Workers and Family Courts.

Otherwise Local Authorities will do what they have done before and ignore them and hide behind them. We still won’t have the clarity of direction we need.

That’s why we need a National Adoption Authority which will be able to impose guidelines and ensure there are penalties for not following them. We need much more of course, like a more streamlined process in the family courts that does not aggravate the delays already present in the system. But most of all we need David Cameron to take the lead.

Like yesterday, the situation is so dramatic that it will require dramatic intervention.

Too much time has passed and too little has happened. Tony Blair tried to help the issue by setting adoption targets. It helped a little – but too little to make a real difference and we know targets don’t work.

Tim Loughton has introduced some new guidelines to allow white parents to adopt non-white children. These rules are being ignored by local authorities and social workers. The reality is the intervention of the government has been too little too late. And let’s face it, there is no compunction on the part of local authorities to follow these passive guidelines. There is no comeback or reinforcement from the government.

Adoption with Humanity will soon be launching a petition to ask the government to intervene in a way that will require local authorities and others to act. I will let you know more soon. Because our present system is more than stupid, it is immoral. In a world where thousands of children languish in care while there are safe, loving families who want them, we have to do something. And we are going to try our very best.

Black and mixed race children wait three times longer than white children to be adopted. For too long social workers in the UK have been implementing what are effectively ghettoisation policies where children must be placed with a family of the same ‘culture’ despite the availability of a loving, stable home in another ‘culture’. Meanwhile they languish in foster care scrapping for a life, while edging closer to their ‘use by’ date, the point at which nobody will want to adopt them because they have become too ‘difficult’ and unlovable.

While the government’s shift on this is a step in the right direction, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Only one-fifth of children waiting for adoption are from minority ethnic families. Meanwhile we have an adoption system that itself is a victim of neglect. It is hard to see how any change can be implemented by social workers without the necessary training. Yes, at times their decisions border on the ridiculous but what is even more absurd in when the DfE points the finger of blame at these messengers and refuses to be accountable for its part in this inhumane and at times, immoral, circus.

If this wasn’t enough to deal with, the lack of any coherent government strategy means it’s about to get worse. Cash strapped councils have always known they can save money by keeping children in care rather than helping them towards adoption. The cuts they are now being forced to make will only exacerbate the situation. While money can be saved in the short-term, the long-term cost to a society that already cannot afford to care for its neglected children may well be greater than anything the government has budgeted for.