London: The red tape used by social workers to prevent couples from adopting children will finally be swept away by common sense reforms, ministers said yesterday.

They condemned the current system as ‘slow and unnecessarily bureaucratic' and for leaving thousands of children abandoned in state care.

Would-be parents have frequently been prevented from adopting children because they were the wrong race, overweight, or because in the past they had smoked.

Couples who have looked to adopt have complained they were insulted and abused during the assessment process.

Children's Minister Tim Loughton announced the overhaul which will see a panel of experts devise a new system for choosing adoptive parents. He said: "Children are waiting too long because we are losing many potentially suitable adoptive parents to a system which doesn't welcome them and often turns them away at the door."

Assessment process

He added: "The assessment process for people wanting to adopt is painfully slow, repetitive and ineffective."

The reform pledge follows months of deepening anger among Tory ministers at the failure of social workers to put their own house in order, despite overwhelming evidence that a high proportion of children in care have been wrongly denied the chance of a better life with a new family. In September, official figures showed that the number of adoptions of children from care had fallen so low that only 60 babies were found new families in the course of a year.

In October, David Cameron ordered a name and shame campaign against councils where social workers delay or derail adoptions.

There have never been any published figures on the numbers of couples turned away for spurious reasons or because of the apartheid-style rules social workers use to decide which families are racially fit to adopt.

But last week adoption agencies reported a surge in applications after a BBC Panorama programme told the stories of six children desperate to find new homes.

In the 1970s around 20,000 children a year, many born to single mothers, were adopted by new families. Numbers plunged in the 1980s alongside improved benefits and free housing for young single mothers, and the development of an anti-adoption mentality among social workers.

Social work chiefs decided that they ‘no longer want to see babies farmed out to middle class mothers'.

Race rules were taken up which said a child could not go to a new family unless they were a close ethnic match.

— Daily Mail