Historical Forced Adoption

Florence Eshalomi Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2026 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

We are setting up a national advice line. It is important that it is national, available and comes in different forms. Digital will work for most people, but not necessarily everyone. We need to make sure that everybody affected and everybody who has not come forward yet finds a way to get that support in the appropriate way. We will take those steps.

[Florence Eshalomi (Vauxhall and Camberwell Green) (Lab/Co-op)]

I too thank the Prime Minister for this important statement, and I pay tribute to the courage of the women who came forward, including my constituent Ann Keen. I met Ann shortly after I was elected in 2019 —we first met online—and what I sensed in Ann was someone who was not going to give up until her voice, and the voices of the many women who suffered this injustice, had been heard, and that wrong had been made right. Ann has worked tirelessly with many other campaigners. In that cross-party spirit, I pay tribute to the late Sir David Amess, who also led on this issue; he delivered a letter to the then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, in May 2021. I still have a text message on my phone from Ann telling me what more I could do. I also served on the Joint Committee on Human Rights, and we launched our report on this subject in July 2022, under the chairmanship of the noble Baroness Harman.

It is right that this apology has come, but as everyone has said, this apology is not enough. What more can be done to ensure that the voices of women are taken seriously? We had the maternity statement the other day. A running theme in all these injustices is women not being believed, women being silenced, and women being told that they are the problem. What more can we do to ensure that women’s voices are front and centre when it comes to matters concerning them?

[The Prime Minister]

I thank my hon. Friend for drawing attention to the anguish that the mothers must have felt, and the constant sense of shame that was inflicted, including on the adult adoptees; they described that to me this morning. The message of being unwanted is really hard. As they said to me this morning, it is not something you can just offload; it is not something that changes. Again, as we discussed this morning, even where parents and children have been reunited, that has not been easy. It is not walking off into the sunset, as we would all like to believe; it is the extremely difficult next chapter of a journey. I thank my hon. Friend for raising that point, and for reminding us of the work of Sir David Amess on this. She is absolutely right that the voices of women have not been heard in the way that they should have been, and that this is not an isolated incident; it is a pattern of behaviour. We have to do better than this.