Meeting of the Parliament 22 November 2016
I welcome the minister’s motion and Labour’s amendment, both of which will be supported by the Conservatives.
As we have heard, this week is adoption week, which is sponsored by Adoption UK: we welcome and support the week’s aims. There are 14,400 looked-after children in Scotland, and last year only 500 children were adopted. Clearly the gap between the number of people who are looking to adopt and the number who are being adopted is still large, and we still have a long way to go to reach and help the most vulnerable. However, we acknowledge that this and previous Governments have tried to do that; we welcome the moves that have been made in the past and look forward to new initiatives in the future.
We need to encourage diversity in people looking to adopt; we must ensure that people from different backgrounds, different types of couples and individuals are willing to put themselves forward. We need to get rid of some of the myths about what or who a person has to be in order to go ahead and adopt, so I hope that what goes out in the media and what happens in Parliament this week sends the positive message that although adoption can be hard, it is fulfilling and helpful, and is something that we want to encourage families and individuals to consider.
I welcome what is happening with Scotland’s adoption register, and I give the Government credit for putting the system online, for ensuring that local authorities can log into it and for making things much more flexible. I should also mention the success of adoption days, in which prospective parents can go and meet social workers and find out at least the bare bones about children who are looking to be adopted. There is, however, an issue in that respect. A constituent in Edinburgh told me that a while ago they went to an adoption day, and although they were matched with a child, the process has taken so long that they are still waiting to adopt. The legal process has moved a long way, but it is still complicated and time consuming: it takes a long time to move from being matched and getting approval to adoption itself. I would welcome it if the Government could look at whether we could speed things up through the legislation and do things to help birth families and adopting families to get through the process.