Introduction

Abstract

My father was adopted when he was nearly four, in early 1928, a year after the first English adoption law came into force. His childhood was unhappy, his relations with his adoptive father strained, and I was not surprised when my mother eventually told me that the grandfather we all called ‘Pop’ was not his real father. At some point it became family lore that he had been picked out from the other children in the orphanage because of his pretty looks but soon afterwards returned when his first adopting parents found him difficult. He was chosen again and this time the adopting parents kept him. I was always intrigued by this casual process, which seemed to have more in common with choosing a dog from a rescue home than the rigorous selection procedure now faced by potential adopters.

A man came a little while ago to us and said he and his wife wanted to adopt a child and had we one for adoption? I said No, I had not. The next day he came back and said he had been to a bureau which had forty children, all of whom could have been adopted, and he could have picked out one and taken it away, but there was not one which happened to suit him. That is really putting it on a par with being able to buy a domestic pet of any kind.

(Lady Henry Somerset, witness before the Hopkinson Committee, 2 November 1920, see Chapter 3)

Overall the adoption system — including the courts — is too slow and bureaucratic, too opaque and too unfair. Children should not be left waiting indefinitely for the perfect family on spurious grounds or a perverse sense of what is and what is not politically correct.

(Alan Milburn, the then Secretary of State for Health, quoted in the Guardian, 30 October 2001)