1000 children wrongly adopted each year says MP

Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming has claimed that 1,000 children are unnecessarily taken away from their families and put up for adoption each year.

Mr Hemming was giving evidence to the Common Education Committee inquiry into child protection when he made the claim, and said that the threshold for taking a child into care is sometimes set too low. Mr Hemming is the founder of Justice for Families, a group which seeks to help parents who want to fight the decision to take their children into care.

When discussing the threshold for taking a child into care, Mr Hemming cited a number of cases were he considered that social workers had incorrectly removed a child from its family. He referred to two cases were children were taken into care and subsequently adopted because parents talked to them in a way the court considered "undermined their self-esteem", and he mentioned another case where a mother was deemed to have put her baby at risk by putting it on a mat with another baby.

Mr Hemming said he calculated that there might be as many as 1000 such cases each year based on "comparative statistics over a number of years", though said it was difficult to measure accurately because the care system "operates in secrecy without accountability".

The ministerial adviser on adoption, Martin Narey, disagreed with Mr Hemming, saying only 1,360 of the 3,040 adoptions in England last year were carried out without the parents' consent, and if any of those cases were handled incorrectly it would be a tiny proportion of 1 or 2%. Mr Narey believes the number of adoptions needs to increase by about 50% a year.

If you live in Northern Ireland and require legal advice in respect of a potential adoption or other family law matter, contact one of the family law solicitors at Wilson Nesbitt in Belfast or Bangor by email at family@wilson-nesbitt.com .

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