Children’s Homes etc. Inspection Fees, Childcare Fees, Adoption and Children Act Register (Amendment) Regulations 2019

Lord Storey Excerpts

Tuesday 18th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Listowel (CB)]

My Lords, I express my thanks to my noble friend for making this important debate possible. When the Minister responds, I would be very grateful if he could be as explicit as possible in assuring the House that no vulnerable child will have been disadvantaged by the change in policy that my noble friend has enunciated.

We and successive Governments have been very concerned about black, Asian and minority ethnic children, sibling groups and children with special education needs being left behind in the adoption process. To successive Governments’ credit, much progress has been made. Obviously, we are all very concerned that this change in policy is not a step backwards.

My noble friend has talked about the imperative to think about the needs of our children and the importance of their future happiness, but we must also as a society think about the cost to society of failing to intervene early and effectively. I visited a residential school for children with severe trauma on Friday. They told me that it can cost a local authority £1 million to place a child in a residential setting. It is costing local authorities huge amounts of money to intervene very late in troubled children’s lives. I pay tribute to what the Government have been doing, but I would really appreciate it if the Minister could make it absolutely clear that there is no disadvantage to the vulnerable children successive Governments have been trying to serve in this change in policy. I look forward to his response.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, my father and his brother were adopted into a loving family, and it changed his and his brother’s lives for good, so in a sense I have a vested interest in this important debate. I welcome the opportunity to speak in support of the Motion to Regret and thank the noble Lord, Lord Russell, for moving it.

I am deeply troubled that the Government’s behaviour has made such a debate necessary. I remember that, during the coalition Government, the then Prime Minister David Cameron rightly spoke of the importance of adoption and the need to ensure that children are matched with the right family and that the process is not dragged into bureaucracy of our making.

I paid careful attention to what the Government said in the Explanatory Memorandum about the revocation of the regulations referring to the adoption register, but there is no explanation, merely a statement of what the regulations state, ending with the following sentence:

“These revocations are necessary as the Secretary of State will not be operating or maintaining an Adoption Register from 1 April 2019”.


That is the sum total of the Government’s justification for simply allowing the adoption register to lapse. They have abandoned—or let lapse—plan A without any plan B.

In the letter to the scrutiny committee, the Children’s Minister says:

“I would like to reassure the Committee that this decision was made following careful scrutiny of all the evidence and I am confident that it will not have a negative impact on children and adopters”.


However, there is no information about what “all the evidence” comprised, nor details of the “careful scrutiny” that the Government claim to have undertaken. It is difficult to challenge the Government’s decision, as the Explanatory Memorandum offers no explanation. The Government cannot claim that there will be no “negative impact”—nor, indeed, any other impact—as they have not undertaken an impact assessment of any sort. The adoption register has disappeared without trace and without any transition arrangements being put in place. Worse than that, there is no suggestion as to what the Government intend to do to replace the register.

Later in his letter, the Minister admits:

“It is my understanding that the charity Coram, the former contractor for the Adoption Register, also intends to set up a matching service. They have communicated that to all local authorities, but I do not know when this service is expected to launch … I do not know how many local authorities choose to subscribe to additional services … I am unable to say what the distribution of local authorities across that range is, except to say that around £5,000 is the average. The amount paid is a matter between individual local authorities and Link Maker”.


The Minister goes on to justify the decision by saying:

“The Adoption Register ceased operating on 31 March 2019, and, since then, I have not received feedback from any adoption agency to suggest they are struggling without it”.


I hope that the Government do not think that the lack of feedback within just seven weeks is evidence that there is no problem.

Some people may think that the regulations are just tidying up some unnecessary bureaucracy or getting rid of another length of red tape, but they would be wrong. It is always easier to talk in the abstract, but this is a shameful—perhaps dreadful—example of the Government pulling out of or back from doing something positive. The Government are washing their hands of hundreds of the most vulnerable children.

According to Coram—it ran the adoption register, as we heard—the hard evidence is that 277 of the most difficult-to-place children were found families in the single year up to 31 March 2019. Although I say “most difficult”, the difficulties are not of the children’s own making but their often complex needs mean that they need adoptive parents with the skill, determination and commitment to provide them with a proper home.

The alternative for many of these children is life in an institution of one sort or another—a life that could be transformed by finding the one set of parents in England that could meet their need for a family life, as happened for my father. In her letter to the scrutiny committee, the chief executive of Coram stated:

“The Adoption Register was the only registered, child-focussed pro-active independent service helping agencies to find adoptive homes for children when all other approaches have been tried. It was a vital extra chance for those who wait the longest - those with additional needs, developmental uncertainty, BAME or in sibling groups”.


In its excellent briefing, Coram said:

“Without the Register, agencies may pay to use an alternative product, with the total cost to the sector likely to exceed the value of the Register contract”.


The commercial alternative, depending on the size of the local authorities and the looked-after children population, is typically between £5,000 and £10,000 per local authority. We are all well aware of the dire situation of children’s services and the difficulty in them finding even this relatively small sum. To cover its annual costs, the register needed to help to find adoptive families for just two children who would otherwise have remained in care for the rest of their childhood—a target that has been achieved every year since it was created.

For some children, the adoption register was their last chance. For every child not adopted because the Government have abandoned the register, and for every adoptive parent not matched with an adopted son or daughter, the impact is incalculable. This Government should be ashamed of allowing the register just to disappear.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, due to the announcement in Part 4 to close the national adoption register for England, these regulations are subject to a regret Motion in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, on which I congratulate him. I should also say that we do not believe that the negative procedure is appropriate in this case. It should be used for routine matters; by no stretch of the imagination is the sudden closure of the national adoption register—with no proper replacement identified, far less in place—a routine matter. As the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said, the Explanatory Memorandum provides no rationale for it.

When a local authority considers placing a child for adoption, it looks for a match with a suitable family, which is often found locally. For some children, it needs to look further afield to families “recruited” by another adoption agency. To facilitate this process, the national adoption register was introduced in 2002. The database included details of children who had been approved for adoption but were waiting to be matched, approved prospective adopters and prescribed information about children for whom the adoption agency was considering adoption. It was used by social workers and approved prospective adopters to seek matches until it was closed down in March this year under these regulations.

Like the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, we find too many unanswered questions associated with the closure of the register. The committee drew the regulations to the special attention of the House on the grounds that the explanatory material laid in support provides insufficient information to gain a clear understanding about the instrument’s policy objective and intended implementation. It also expressed concern that there was no public consultation on the closure.

Such was its concern that it held an oral evidence session with the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Children and Families. The committee remain dissatisfied with Mr Zahawi’s responses to its probing about the potential implications of the Department for Education ceasing provision of the register before a replacement system is ready, particularly regarding the impact on hard-to-place children. At that session, the Minister stated repeatedly that his aim was to end what he called the “silo mentality”, saying that he wanted to bring fostering and adoption into one place. That is a worthy aim, but, unfortunately, he offered no suggestion as to how that might be achieved and said nothing at all about when or even if a new type of national register would be established involving children available either for adoption or fostering or both. How the needs of children would be separated if such a register were ever to be established was not left hanging because it was not even mentioned.