Education and Adoption Bill

David Lammy Excerpts

Monday 22nd June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

Last September could well turn out to be the most important month in my life. I began the month by announcing that I intended to seek the Labour nomination for Mayor of London, and I am hoping to achieve that by this September. More importantly, towards the end of the month, I slipped out of the Labour party conference following the speech by the former Leader of the Opposition—that had nothing to do with his speech, by the way—and made my way to meet my new daughter, whom my wife and I had just adopted. I am here today to raise issues about adoption.

There are just under 70,000 young people in the care system in our country. I see that the Minister with responsibility for adoption, the Minister for Children and Families, is in his place. He will know that it is important that couples with their own birth children should feel able to adopt. I congratulate the previous Government on their success in speeding up the system and in stating that we should not hold up adoption, particularly for black and minority ethnic children, solely on the basis of finding adopters of the same race. Much progress has been made, and we are now seeing many more children being placed for adoption instead of languishing in the system. The Minister did a considerable amount to achieve that, as did the former Secretary of State.

However, there are many foster carers, many children in residential care, and many kinship carers, and they do not feature in the Bill. That is a matter of concern for those outside this place who play such an important role in the lives of looked-after children. If we are serious about finding those children a home for life, it is important that we attract couples with birth children to the adoption process. I hope that the Minister will have something to say about how we are going to achieve that within the system.

We must also do considerably more to support families adopting children who are from much harder target groups than the traditional baby daughter or baby son. They include children with tremendous disabilities, children with profound mental health problems, black and minority ethnic children and children who are older at the time they become available for adoption, some of whom have reached their teenage years. This is a real difficulty in our system, but again the Bill says very little about how those children can successfully find a home.

I am not saying that it is appropriate for all such children to be adopted, however, and there are concerns about forced adoption. There are countries, certainly in Europe, where forced adoption is unusual. We must give better support to poorer parents, for example, and to those with drug or alcohol problems. We must support them so that they are better able to parent their children. It is important to stress that this debate is taking place against a backdrop of huge cuts to local government, which are having an impact on children’s services, on budgets for social workers and on the means to support those parents so that they can continue to parent their children, hard though that might be.

I hope that the Minister will also say a little more about what is envisaged for regional adoption agencies. There are some very good agencies out there—I was supported by one of them—and there are bigger agencies that could do more. Some local authorities are already working in consortium to try to attract parents. Also, many children are clearly best suited to being adopted outside their local area because of the complexities surrounding their families.

Will the Minister also say something about the strengths of our maintained school system? It is a matter of tremendous concern that Ministers seem to want to talk only about chain and sponsored academies and not about converter academies. It limits the argument somewhat if they do not acknowledge the fantastic schools in the maintained sector. In the end, the debate must always be about standards and children, and not about structure.