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Mr. Oaten: The hon. Gentleman is right to say that there is concern that not all countries are covered by the convention, but the Department of Health and others are doing a great deal of work to persuade as many countries as possible to be part of it. I hope that many cases and countries will be covered by the convention, but the law cannot be bypassed and it will certainly protect children, even those coming from non-convention countries. It will still be illegal to traffick, so there will be no way in which countries can avoid those procedures by not being convention countries.
Dr. Palmer: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that clarification, although it is not clear to me exactly how a couple should proceed if, for reasons of friendship, they want to adopt a child from a country that is not yet a signatory. Perhaps that will be addressed in later discussions.
If the other country is a signatory, but is unable to fulfil the terms of the convention due to maladministration or current disturbances within it, there may be an additional problem. I wonder whether we could--perhaps under article 29--allow for some exemption in such circumstances. The hon. Member for Winchester referred to the current situation in Yugoslavia. I understand that, if a couple in Britain were willing to adopt an orphan from Kosovo, but Yugoslavia, which is currently the legal authority responsible for Kosovo, was unwilling to
support that process despite being a signatory to the convention, no progress could be made. Perhaps he will consider that aspect and refer to it in his response.
Ms Ann Coffey (Stockport):
I congratulate the hon. Member for Winchester (Mr. Oaten) on securing a place in the ballot and on his choice of a Bill that will make an important contribution to improving children's welfare. I also welcome the support of my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Health, who has responsibilities in this area. He is strongly committed to improving the quality of adoption services in this country.
I should declare an interest. Before I was elected to Parliament, I worked for a local authority in a team specialising in adoption and fostering, and I accept that that may have influenced my views. Adoption is an emotive issue, and about one in 10 people in this country have been affected either directly or indirectly by the experience. Public views are often defined by personal experience.
The Bill is welcome because it will provide, for the first time, a proper legal framework for intercountry adoption. As the hon. Member for Winchester said, the present arrangements are open to abuse, do not encourage high standards in adoption and are frustrating to prospective adopters.
Intercountry adoption is increasing. In 1993, there were 101 such adoptions; in 1998, there were 258, and 38 took place in the north of England. Every year, approximately 2,000 adoption orders are made in this country, so intercountry adoption is not such an insignificant part. The quality of those adoptions and the welfare of the children involved deserve serious attention.
The growth in intercountry adoption is understandable, because couples who wish to adopt find that the number of children available for adoption in the UK is declining. They may face long waits, especially for babies, or find that the children who are available are older than they would wish or have complex backgrounds, present difficult emotional problems or have serious handicaps. The adoption of a child from another country appears to offer that child an opportunity for a permanent family and, at the same time, provide the much desired family for the couple or person seeking adoption. The 1993 Hague convention on protection of children and co-operation in respect of intercountry adoption recognises that intercountry adoption may offer the advantage of a permanent family to a child for whom a suitable family cannot be found in his or her state of origin. Such children may face a childhood in institutional care and a lifetime in poverty. However, intercountry adoption is a controversial area, because it essentially involves the adoption of children from poor countries by people from the relatively affluent west.
I found on the internet last night 100 sites set up by agencies in what is called the US market offering to facilitate intercountry adoption of children from all over the world. One agency offered 750 children. The prospect of such large-scale intercountry adoption developing in this country is alarming. The hon. Member for Winchester
mentioned that people were concerned about paying the fee for a home study report, but the prices charged by agencies abroad vary from $10,000 to $22,000, depending on the child available. The younger the child, the more expensive the agency fee. It is indeed a market, and it is privately financed. If people are worried about the cost of home study reports, they are unlikely to be able to afford the agency fees in the countries where the children reside. However, I agree with the hon. Gentleman that the cost in this country should be uniform; we should ensure that the cost is not higher for someone living in Manchester than it is for someone living in Norfolk.
As I have said, the issue is controversial. The British Agencies for Adoption and Fostering say in one of their leaflets that, although adoption may be the answer for one individual, it will never be the solution for meeting the needs of millions of children in families in situations of extreme deprivation. It expresses the concern that, if large-scale intercountry adoption programmes were introduced, they could prevent or delay the development of proper local child care programmes. It expresses a special concern about intercountry adoption as a response to war and conflict which may result in huge numbers of displaced children for whom it may be difficult to establish whether they have any living relatives.
Dr. Palmer:
As I understand it, the provisions of the Bill would meet that objection in that they would permit an intercountry adoption only if a thorough investigation had taken place into the child's circumstances.
Ms Coffey:
As I understand it, if the country in which the child is residing has ratified the Hague convention, everyone can be sure that a proper investigation has been carried out to ensure that the child is available for adoption. The concern is that, in countries that have not ratified it, one cannot be sure that the proper investigations have taken place. We may have got our procedures right, but the countries offering children may not, especially in times of conflict when children may become separated from parents who cannot be found.
Others have concerns about children being removed from their country of origin and contact with their culture. They question whether a solution that appears in the short term to offer so much to parents and child will, in the long term, cause difficulties as those children grow through adolescence into adulthood. We should not underestimate the difficulties of intercountry adoption, and of adoption in general. It is not an easy option and can raise issues of identity for the child in later life.
Adoption practice in this country has changed and parents are encouraged to help their adoptive children to understand their identity by being open with them about their adoptive status from an early age. Meetings can be arranged between the mother offering the child for adoption and the adoptive parents. Adoptive parents can be encouraged to keep mementoes of the child's background, including pictures of their birth families, and--in some cases--to keep contact with relatives. Gone are the days when children discovered their adoptive status later in life and when the idea of adoption was to act as if, for all intents and purposes, the adoptive parents were the birth parents and the child's past identity was wiped out as if it did not exist. For all of us, the question
of who we are is answered in part by where we came from and the family stories that give us a sense of continuity with the past and our place in the future. That is important to ensure the success of adoption, and can be difficult in intercountry adoption, but not impossible.
I do not believe that the issues that I have outlined can be resolved by an ideological approach. For a child without a caring family to grow up in, having a happy, loving family in this country and being offered opportunities and a real chance in life are much the best outcome, especially if the existing culture can offer only poverty and early death. On the other hand, for a child to be placed in a family who offer inadequate or abusive parenting and to end up in care in one of our institutions, facing a poor future, does not seem such a good outcome; that child might have been better left in an orphanage.
I am pleased to support the Bill, not because it is designed to encourage large-scale intercountry adoptions, but because it will improve the quality of such adoptions to ensure their success. It would amend existing adoption legislation to make it clear that the adoption service provided by local authorities includes all adoptions, not just those made in Great Britain. It would mean that voluntary agencies wishing to be approved for intercountry adoptions must be approved for all adoptions and that standards of assessment for people wishing to be approved will be the same, regardless of the country of origin of the child. That has not always been the case and local authorities have sometimes viewed the preparation of a report on a couple applying to adopt in another country as having a lower priority and have given less attention to it, so that couples seeking such a report often become frustrated. That is because intercountry adoption has been seen as outside mainstream work. The Bill would put it back into the mainstream, and that can only be of benefit to children and increase the chances of successful adoption.
The quality of the adoptions is key and we must continue to drive up standards generally, and learn from adoption casualties. Those casualties exist because adoption is not always a case of a family walking off into the sunset and living happily ever after. Some of the stories of adopted children make it clear that that is far from the case. Apart from adoption breakdowns, many families live together in chronic unhappiness and may wish that the adoption never took place. We must learn from that experience, and from the experience of agencies such as After Adoption, which is a voluntary agency in Greater Manchester which gives counselling to those who have been affected by adoption. Unless we learn from experience and improve standards for adoption in this country, we shall not ensure that intercountry adoptions are successful, which is what the Bill seeks to achieve.
The last time I asked the Department of Health for statistics was prior to 1997, which is a key date for the House. The statistics it kept on adoptions were fairly minimal, particularly those on adoption breakdowns, which would help us to understand better the factors that indicate success. That is an important issue, because, if people are preparing reports on potential adoptive parents and are asking questions about their lives and personal relationships, they should know why they need to ask those questions. Indeed, sometimes I wondered about some of the questions that I was having to ask. If we understood the key factors in predicting a successful outcome, the home study reports could be constructed so that questions were pertinent and served a useful purpose.
The quality of information about successful adoptions should be improved, as should the standards of adoption in this country. A number of agencies apply good practice, but that can be achieved only with proper dissemination of information. It should be made clear that we want high standards, and that hon. Members do not give this matter a low priority.
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