Experts Warn of a Rise in Babies Entering Care Proceedings
The number of babies brought into care proceedings is rising, and specialists have warned that some may be adopted unnecessarily, according to evidence given to the BBC. The concern is that decisions taken at speed, and under pressure, are harder to reverse for the youngest children than for any other group in the system.
This matters because of where it sits in the sequence. Care proceedings for an infant start a statutory clock, and the younger the child the more strongly the system favours permanence — which in practice means adoption, the one outcome that cannot be undone if the original judgement was wrong. Set that against a decade in which local authority children’s services have been among the most financially squeezed parts of local government, and the risk is not malice but throughput: thresholds moving quietly because the alternative is a service that cannot cope. The counter-argument is just as serious, and it is why this is contested rather than scandalous — the cases where the state waited too long are the ones that end in inquiries. What would settle it is data on how many of these proceedings end in adoption against reunification, broken down by the age of the child, and whether that ratio has shifted. This is a single broadcaster’s reporting of expert concern rather than a published dataset, and it should be read that way until the figures follow. Watch for the family justice statistics, and for whether the president of the Family Division comments.