Under the Government’s proposal, courts and adoption agencies will continue to have to have regard to,
“the child’s age, sex, background and any of the child’s characteristics which the court or agency considers relevant”,
as set out in the welfare checklist. The Government take a strong view that that must include the child’s ethnicity. We therefore believe that the amendment is not necessary, as that aspect of a child’s identity will form part of an agency’s, or court’s, considerations in deciding the most appropriate match for a child. It is not in the nature of social workers to ignore ethnicity. That has been confirmed by discussions I have had with practitioners, to which I will refer shortly.
On the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, on the JCHR, we do not agree with the Joint Committee that the clause is incompatible with the United Nations convention. We are satisfied that the requirement in the welfare checklist to have regard to
the child’s background and characteristics includes ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic background. There is also a risk that to place the requirement in the welfare checklist as the amendment proposes will have the effect of giving this aspect of a child’s identity more significance than other equally important characteristics such as disability.
Due to the current wording, some local authorities have paid undue rather than due regard to ethnicity in some cases, at the expense of other needs of the child, as most noble Lords have acknowledged. Since Committee, I have spoken with several directors of children’s services about our proposals. I will share with noble Lords what those who are willing to be quoted told me, and why they support our clause. Ade Adetosoye is Director of Community and Children’s Services, City of London, and spent seven years as the director of social care at Lambeth Council, during which time his leadership helped transform practice. He told me:
“Changing the legislation to remove this explicit requirement is a positive thing—it will not change the good work of many local authorities who already look for the best placements rather than the perfect match. However, poorer performing local authorities do sometimes look too hard for the perfect match to the detriment of the child”.
Andrew Christie, Executive Director of Children’s Services for Westminster, Hammersmith and Fulham, and Kensington and Chelsea, said:
“I fully support the government’s plans not to have ethnicity on the face of the Bill and the welfare checklist because there is evidence that suggests that this leads to some social workers trying too hard to make the perfect match which can result in the child taking a very long time to be adopted, or in some cases never being adopted at all. In my authorities we have a strong focus on people realising that the crucial thing for the child is that the clock is ticking”.
Tim Coulson, Director for Commissioning: Education and Lifelong Learning, Essex, who has himself adopted a child of a different race, said:
“We agree with the Government’s proposal to remove the requirement in legislation to give due consideration to ‘a child’s religious persuasion, racial origin, and cultural and linguistic background’ because we think that this requirement makes some social workers look too long for an ideal match based on these factors”.
Those are practitioners at the coal face.
I think we all agree that we therefore need to change the behaviour and culture of some social workers. We think that the right way to do this is through considerably enhanced guidance, so we have been spending a great deal of time talking to the NSPCC and others about this. I have also had the opportunity to talk to the marvellous charity Hope and Homes for Children, which specialises in going into conflict-torn areas—it started in Bosnia—and placing children in adoptive-type arrangements. It has considerable experience of making cross-race placements, including of Roma children—there is a massive shortage of Roma adopters—and emphasised strongly to me in some detail the importance of training and advice for adopters in that situation.
The debates with noble Lords have made us look closely at the guidance on this issue. We need to underpin practice with nuanced statutory guidance and will continue to work with the NSPCC and others. We intend that the revised statutory—not discretionary—guidance on which we will consult in the new year, and
on which I would welcome noble Lords’ comments, will build on the existing draft. It will add that identity, background and heritage are issues that may need to be addressed at different times in a child’s life so that they understand their identity within the family and wider society, particularly as the child reaches adulthood. The noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, spoke convincingly and passionately from personal experience about the importance of this.
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