My Lords, I support all these amendments and pick up what the noble Lord, Lord Warner, has just said. I entirely agree with him about the importance of supporting long-term fostering as a very important alternative. However, we are living at a time when adoption is not doing very well. One has to recognise that as much support for adoption as possible should be given because, since the publication of the Adoption Post-Legislative Scrutiny report by the Select Committee to which the noble Lord referred, which I chaired, we have had fewer adoptions. We have to bear that in mind. However, I totally support the idea that long-term fostering is an extremely important alternative, particularly for the older child who wants to retain some links with the natural family, and for whom adoption is therefore inappropriate.
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I would like to say something about the child’s wishes and feelings. I sat as a family judge, one way or another, for 35 years, and that was of great importance
to me. Section 1 of the Children Act talks about the requirement on the judge to take into account the “wishes and feelings” of the child, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, referred. I have no doubt that most local authorities want to know what children think, but they may not, and they do not actually have any legal requirement to do what judges have to do as a legal requirement. It seems odd that in Part 4 of the Children Act there is no requirement for that, as far as I can remember, although I have such a tiny rendering of it on my iPad that I cannot quite read it, and I forgot to bring a better copy of the Children Act with me. But I do not think that under Section 31, or any of the other sections—those who know better are agreeing with me—there is any requirement on the local authority to take account of the wishes and feelings of children. I can understand that being the case in 1989. Despite my Cleveland report, and despite Lord Denning and the Gillick case, we did not take children’s feelings and wishes all that seriously. But in 2016, we have moved on—and the Children Act in this aspect should move on. I hope the Government take the amendment very seriously.
On the third point that the noble Baroness, Lady King of Bow, made about the mental health problems of adopted children, in our post-legislative scrutiny committee we got a lot of evidence about the real hardship of parents who have adopted, some of whom had not quite realised the extent of the trauma of the children they had taken on. They were not equipped to deal with it and, at the very worst, some of those children went back into care, which was not just a failure for the adoptive parents—it was the most appalling failure for the child. It was one failure after another.
If it is possible for the adoptive parents to get proper help at an early enough stage to be told how to cope, you can stop that disaster of the child going back into care. We got such a lot of evidence—and I have heard it from elsewhere, as many other noble Lords in this Room have—of how adoptive parents have sought help and not received it, or have not known how to seek it. It is the local authority or adoption agency that has the responsibility to put them in the right place to get the help. So I support what the noble Baroness, Lady King, suggested.