Adoption Is Straightforward – Or Is it?

In England today, we have more people wanting to adopt children than children waiting to be adopted. There are just under 3,000 children waiting for a new family and 3,130 approved adopters.

This sounds like the perfect scenario. Yet many of those children will spend around 18 months on average waiting for a new family. In 2013-14, the journey from entry into the adoption system to placement with an adopter took 594 days. It then took a further 2,016 days for an Adoption Order, where the adoptive parents become legal family, to be made. Last year no adoptive family could be found for 1,450 children. To read the article in full go to The Telegraph

Under the coalition government, the process did speed up. The time from an adopter registering their interest in a child to becoming their parent now takes six months. In the past it could take two years.

Until now, there have been two major problems that delay the adoption process. The first is financial. At present, if a child is matched with an adopter outside the local authority in which they are registered, the local authority needs to pay the adopter’s voluntary adoption agency or local authority a fee of £28,000. This covers the costs of training, assessing and approving the adopters. But this interagency fee narrows the pool of potential adopters available and so causes delay.
To address this problem, the government announced a £30 million package  to cover the cost of the interagency fee. The move is welcome: getting rid of this fee will allow local authorities to widen their search for families without worrying about the financial cost.