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Children

My Lords, it is what is not in Safeguarding Children that I want to talk about. There is absolutely nothing in it about safeguarding children from those local authorities whose speciality seems to be stealing people’s children on the flimsiest of pretexts and offering them for adoption. I refer your Lordships to an article in the Daily Telegraph on the leader page on 30 August by Cassandra Jardine in which she mentions a number of cases which had come to her notice. This was no surprise to me as cases have been coming to my ears over the last few years, but when I drew a Minister’s attention to a particular one, I got nowhere. On 14 August there was a horrifying case reported in the Mail on Sunday of two children taken from their parents by Essex County Council because the mother had ““a slight learning difficulty””. After being taken into care one of the children developed hydrocephalus or swelling of the brain, possibly genetic but possibly caused by an injury. As a result the would-be adopters—oh yes, they were already lined up!—did not want them after all. So those children, who had suffered the hell of being removed from a perfectly happy home, were condemned to be brought up in care, with all the danger of abuse, loneliness and misery that we all know perfectly well a childhood in care entails. Neither is a thought given nowadays to the misery of the parents whose beloved children have been torn away from them. When I voted, to the horror of many of my colleagues last year, in favour of allowing gay couples to adopt children, I did so because I believed that it would reduce the number of children being brought up in that most wretched of situations—in care. Now I am beginning to believe that I have been completely conned by both the Government and the local authority social services, and that this was a plot between the Government and the local authorities to enable the local authorities to steal more children and offer them for adoption. The only ray of light that I have seen among all the incomprehensible jargon that has landed on my desk is a paper called Disclosure of information in family proceedings cases involving children: response to the public consultation, which was published by the Department for Constitutional Affairs in July. It is almost incomprehensible too, but I hope that I am right in thinking that it advocates more openness in family court procedures, so that accused parents might be able to find out what the evidence against them is, which at present they cannot do. I do not think that anything has happened yet, and I have no reason to suppose that it ever will. The whole area of childcare is of very great concern to me. None of us wants any more cases such as that of Victoria Climbié, but things are now going too far the other way, and local authorities are now so frightened of having another case like that that they can hardly bear to leave any child in a home that does not conform to their politically correct, cornflake packet, Janet and John ideal. I part completely from them over that, because I believe that even quite a bad home is infinitely preferable to being in care, or even being taken away from everything you have ever known to be adopted by strangers. Things have to be very bad indeed for that to be preferable. I call tell noble Lords from my own circle of acquaintance that—because of the propensity of doctors in cahoots with social workers to believe the worst—the wife of a young friend of mine, when their son aged five did something silly and banged his head and concussed himself, as children are so wont to do, did not dare take him to their own GP, but put him in the car and drove him 150 miles to Edinburgh to her father, who was a GP. Lucky her to be able to do that! Few have that option in this nasty nanny and police state that we now seem to be living in.