Prue Leith

The waiting game

<p class="p1"><span class="s1">Tortuous procedures do little to help vulnerable children find homes</span></p>

When my husband, John, was born in 1946, doctors were the chief agents of adoption. His mother was young, single, pregnant and desperate. Her doctor had another patient, a happily married but childless woman in search of a baby. The doctor, knowing the two women, solved both their problems by handing John to his new parents at birth.

Thirty years later I adopted my Cambodian daughter, Li-Da, with minimal fuss. We had a visit from a social worker to check us out. Within days a legal guardian was appointed, and we were allowed to foster Li-Da at once. After three months, with the occasional visit from her guardian, we adopted her.

How very different it is today. The tortuous process Li-Da, now 43, and her husband are going through in search of a child to love makes me wonder if the whole thing doesn’t need a re-think. David Cameron declared he’d speed up the process with the 2016 Children and Social Work Bill, but many councils didn’t adopt the recommendations and his efforts have made no difference. The process still takes years.

There are now nearly 73,000 ‘looked after’ children in the UK, rising every year, and it gets increasingly difficult to place them as they get older. More than 1,100 youngsters are currently up for adoption, but only around 500 couples or singles are waiting to adopt. Those 1,100 children are the ones who social services have finally decided cannot be reunited with their birth family (72 per cent of adopted children are removed from their homes on account of abuse or neglect). The average age at which British-born children are adopted is three years and four months.

At first glance the problem looks like cumbersome bureaucracy. If you want to adopt you first have to go through at least six months (but more likely a year) of form-filling, interviews, inspections and a panel examination about your history, your reasons, your character, your situation, your finances, your attitudes etc, before you are cleared to apply to adopt.

You then have to wait for the offer of a child.

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