– artwork by Sophie Rhys

– article by Luna Copponex-Botsford

On 2 July 2026, then prime minister Keir Starmer apologised in Parliament on behalf of the UK government for the forced adoption practices in England that took place between 1949 and 1976.

During this period, roughly 185,000 women, often in poverty or unmarried, were made to feel ashamed or unworthy and were pressured by the state to give up their babies.

These children were then taken from their families and stripped of their identity and history, with minimal support in place for them to reach their birth families.

In response to years of campaigns from mothers, adopted people and support organisations, the government now recognises that the state did not do enough to protect the families involved from harm and has offered a £4 million support package that will be delivered over the next three years.

The support package has been designed around what those affected believe matters most and includes funding towards helping the families; gain access to adoption records, reconnect with their families and provide the mental, health and community support they may need through the process.

This is a huge win for those affected, as not only has the government recognised the harm their practices have caused, but also they have laid out practical measures alongside their written promises. For example, much of the support package is accompanied by acting charities and organisations such as Coram BAAF to help people trace their adoption records and Family Connect to help people search for and reconnect with birth family members.

Current practices remain in need of reform

Alongside this pledge, the government has also acknowledged that some people’s experiences of coercive adoption practices extend beyond 1976. Yet, their statement also asserts that today’s “adoption system is fundamentally different, with strong legal safeguards, clear consent requirements, and independent judicial oversight in place”.

As ATD Fourth World works on the forefront with those experiencing poverty, we cannot help but feel that whilst practices have improved since this dark time, still more progress remains to be made.

In 2021, of the 2,270 children placed for adoption in England, only 13% were adopted “with consent”.*

Even that figure may overstate genuine choice because Emeritus Professor of Social Work, Care and Community at the University of Central Lancashire, Andy Bilson, argues that many parents don’t so much consent as “give in”, worn down by what he describes as the overwhelming power of the state ranged against them. This means that, six decades on from the practices Starmer apologised for, we continue to see the dynamic he described: parents with no real power to refuse.

Post-adoption contact

State control continues after adoptions. The primary means of post-adoption contact between birth families and their children is “letterbox contact”, with one or two letters a year permitted until the child turns 18.

In conversations with ATD Fourth World, families describe a system that rarely delivers the comfort it promises. The contents of this correspondence are inspected. It may be censored or shredded for violations of certain parameters—such as adding a photograph, writing ‘I love you’, or referring to the birth mother as ‘Mummy’. Some correspondence can be painfully delayed as a result of slow processing. Some families describe feeling constantly watched by the authorities overseeing the exchange.

The scheme points to a system that leaves family members with almost no independence to relate to each other on their own terms. Whilst the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory recommends changes to modernise post-adoption contact via a digital platform called the virtual memory box, this remains optional for adoptive families to opt into. Change is seen as long overdue and a signifier of the system being “too slow to keep up with itself”.

Additionally, adoption is only the endpoint of a much larger system, and it’s in that system that the deeper problem sits. Bilson argues that:

“The guiding principle that social work should mean partnership and support has been steadily displaced by a culture of investigation and blame”.

Child protection investigations have risen sharply since 2008: by 2017, one in every 16 children under five was being investigated for possible neglect. That figure is now thought to have risen to around one in eight children overall. Bilson estimates that to be as high as one in four among families in deep poverty.

Damage done by investigations

What makes this rise hard to justify is that it hasn’t translated into more protection. According to Bilson, in 2008 roughly one in two investigations led to a child protection plan; today it’s closer to one in three. More families are being investigated; but a shrinking proportion of investigations find child neglect.

This has a cost. Investigation is more resource-intensive than early preventative support, so every hour spent investigating a family is an hour not spent on support; meaning the rise in investigations comes directly at the expense of prevention.

For the families who are investigated, the experience itself instils fear and reluctance to ask for help, a burden that falls disproportionately on families along lines of class and race.

ATD Fourth World’s work identifies a clear link between child poverty and the high rate of both investigations and court proceedings in the UK. An estimated 90% of children forcibly adopted come from families living in poverty. This is a consequence of policy choices. Early-help budgets and family-support programmes like Sure Start have been cut to almost nothing, leaving little support for parents already struggling with the stress and stigma of raising children on a very low income. Once a crisis point is reached, the response is investigation, not help. Families in poverty are left exposed to interventions that are inconsistent and risk-averse, and that also give too little weight to the harm caused by removal itself, including into contested, closed adoptions.

Improving practice

It doesn’t have to be this way. In Leeds and Camden, councils have recognised the cost of over-investigation and deliberately reduced it. This has freed up time and resources for preventative work with local families and communities, which is a working demonstration that the cycle can be broken.

Yet that kind of shift is being actively undercut by the direction of the wider system. Children’s social care was opened up to privatisation in 2014, turning a large part of the sector into a profitable industry: in 2021, the ten largest providers made over £300 million in profit between them. The financial incentive is to keep children in care, instead of to invest in resolving the problems families face at home.

The cost of that choice is intergenerational. Bilson’s research found that 42% of children taken into care had a parent who had themselves been in care. This is evidence of a cycle in which the trauma of separation, disrupted attachment, and placement in a foster home a child never chose to be in reproduces the very conditions the system was meant to prevent.

New reforms are needed

ATD Fourth World welcomes the government’s apology, but urges it to extend that same scrutiny to the present. The scope of the inquiry and its support should reach contemporary cases, and poverty should be recognised for what it is in child protection and family court decisions: a source of stress that families need support to manage, not evidence of risk.

Too often, families who ask for help are met with suspicion and intrusive checks rather than the support they came looking for. This is a response that punishes families for the poverty they’re living in rather than addressing it.

At its core, ATD Fourth World believes contested adoptions are a violation of human rights: every parent should be able to raise their family free from fear, and be treated with dignity by the very system meant to support them. United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, Dr. Koldo Casla, argues that the current situation compromises the rights of families in poverty, including the right to protection and assistance to the family of Article 10 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, signed and ratified by the UK.**

ATD Fourth World will keep fighting to secure this essential right, and keep making space for people to share their untold realities, because this lived experience feeds the knowledge needed to learn, grow, and change the system.

An apology for the past is meaningful only if it changes how the state treats families in poverty today. ATD Fourth World will keep building toward a world where no family’s protection is negotiable.

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*Cherry Casey. “The UK Has a Forced Adoption Problem“, Prospect Magazine, 22 October 2022.

**Koldo Casla, Lyle Barker, “Protection and Assistance to the Family: Interpreting and Applying Article 10 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights from Learnt and Lived Experiences”, Journal of Human Rights Practice, Volume 16, Issue 2, July 2024, Pages 489–511, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhuman/huae009