Adoption

Dan Poulter Excerpts

Wednesday 9th November 2011 Westminster Hall

[David Simpson]

I agree wholeheartedly with the hon. Lady. Certainly, if being overweight had been an issue, I would not have fitted the bill. Later on this afternoon, my hon. Friend the Member for East Londonderry (Mr Campbell) will introduce a Westminster Hall debate on the Government policy on obesity, and he has dared me to attend. [Laughter.] I will go to it.

The hon. Member for Gosport (Caroline Dinenage) is right. No one is perfect and it is very hard to get a role model of a parent. We all have frustrations. Even if people have children through the natural process, they experience frustrations because they do not know how those children are going to turn out, which is difficult. The hon. Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) raised the issue of the age of prospective parents and I think that she said she is 47. May I say that she looks very well for 47? If I was a social worker, I would take her for 27, but we will not go down that road.

Returning to the serious point, it is nonsense for social services to restrict the number of prospective parents just because someone is over 40, or 45. That is absolutely scandalous. One of the prospective parents who had come to see me and who had been told that they could not adopt, was told that one reason was they were over 45, so when the child reached their teenage years the prospective father could not play football with them. That is absolute nonsense—the whole thing is crazy.

We must try to get a balance in all of this. In Northern Ireland 25 years ago, what my wife and I did was very new. We went to an agency, we went through missionaries, and we adopted our first child from India. That was 25 years ago this December. I think that we were the second set of parents in Northern Ireland to adopt a child from a foreign country. The reason was simple; it was because the waiting list to adopt a child in Northern Ireland was horrendous. It was unbelievable. We felt that we could give a child a home, and as we could not have that child from the British system, we were forced to go down another avenue.

We did that 25 years ago. We have had no problems whatsoever from a cultural or ethnic viewpoint, and we have experienced no racism in any way. My daughter is now 25 and she runs her own business. Then we adopted twins from Paraguay. At that time, the dictator in Paraguay made it very clear that he would prefer it if children died on the streets of Paraguay than be adopted by a western society. He did not have his way and we adopted the twins. Someone asked us after we did that if we were trying to start our own United Nations, but we decided to stop at just the three children because we knew that the United Nations was nothing to be proud of. We did not go down that road.

Our twins are now 22, and again that adoption has worked well; there are absolutely no issues. However, the point that I am making is that because of the system we were forced to go in that direction. The system needs to be looked at. Two and a half years is much too long for any prospective parent to wait for a child. We need to deal with that, and we must address the ageism involved in beliefs about the age a prospective parent should be.

[Dr Daniel Poulter (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Erewash (Jessica Lee) on securing this excellent debate. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that families who put themselves forward for adoption often have had fertility problems? Not only are they waiting throughout the lengthy bureaucratic process of adoption, but they might have been trying for children and have had a desire to contribute, by bringing up a family, for a long time—perhaps up to five or six years.

[David Simpson]

That is 100% right. The hon. Gentleman raises a very important issue, and we need to get to grips with the situation. On many such issues, the policy of the present Government and of previous Governments for many years—I am not pointing the figure at any one in particular—has been, “We’ll put a sticking-plaster over it and that will last for another while. Then we’ll perhaps bring out a wee bit of legislation or else we’ll go out for consultation.” The period involved is frustrating for potential adoptive parents. Last year in the United Kingdom, only 60 out of 3,600 children under the age of one in care were placed with families. That scandal must be dealt with, and I trust that the Minister will take note. Many families who are willing to give children a loving home are not given the opportunity to do so.