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The Children's Society's decision to axe all its services in Wales has met with a wave of protest as concerns grow over how children's needs can be met. Alex Dobson reports.

Staff and young people have greeted with anger and disillusion last week's shock announcement that the Children's Society is to make sweeping cuts in its services in England and withdraw completely from Wales.

In Wales, where the withdrawal is to be absolute, moves are being made to try to salvage the work funded by the society. Meanwhile, staff in parts of England are preparing to take industrial action. According to one source, there are questions that remain unanswered about the way the charity has handled its sudden announcement and the direction it is likely to take.

As part of the rescue package, a team of experienced practitioners in Wales are considering a range of models and are requesting detailed financial information to help them organise the transfer of properties and equipment. Much of the work that the charity does in Wales is also part-funded by local authorities, and staff say that with adequate support they may be able to takeover vital projects and keep them alive.

"Part-funding by local authorities and the assembly could continue," a statement from staff in Wales insists hopefully. "Being separate from the society would free us to make applications to trust funds, to gain access to funding locally and perhaps from the church in Wales. Our community projects were approved by local partnerships for Objective One funding, but not by the Wales European Funding Office. These bids could be resubmitted."

Staff at Children's Society Cymru are questioning the basis on which the trustees made their decision. In particular, they query whether the trustees had enough information to come to a fair and considered decision that would best serve the long-term objectives of the Children's Society UK.

They stress that as well as speaking for themselves, they are also determined to represent the thousands of children across Wales who benefit from services provided by the charity. "Wales is one of the poorest countries in Europe and we all serve and work with some of the poorest and most vulnerable children, young people and families," the statement adds.

As for the society's future direction, out-going chief executive Ian Sparks says it has been decided that the focus should be on taking the charity forward as a "social justice organisation", with a higher public and political profile as a champion of children's rights.

The Welsh minister with responsibility for social services, Jane Hutt, has also agreed that a task force bringing together all the relevant interest groups in Wales should be set up to look at the issues. In particular, the 13 advocacy projects currently part-funded by the Children's Society are seen as a fundamental part of Welsh child welfare work.

Advocacy projects were specifically called for in the report of the Waterhouse tribunal that looked at child abuse in children's homes in north Wales. Tribunal chairperson Sir Ronald Waterhouse believes it would be a major blow if the charity's work is abandoned.

"The children's advocacy is a vital part of the general network of safety that we wanted for children in care and children at risk generally,'' he argues.

Major players in the child welfare field in Wales see the society's failure to involve other key agencies before making their decision as an example of how UK-based charities can sometimes fail to acknowledge that Wales is now devolved with its own system of governance.

Wales recently took the landmark decision to appoint its own children's commissioner, Peter Clarke, who was as surprised and dismayed as Hutt that no one from the charity had approached them before the decision to withdraw was taken.

"The large UK charities are struggling to come to terms with devolution, both in terms of their attitudes and outlooks, and their structures," Clarke says.

"For the Children's Society to act in this way is appalling and high-handed. It is treating Wales as a sort of sub-post office that they can close without warning when the going gets tough. There has been a complete lack of communication and very little understanding shown of the devolved powers that Wales has. I think there is an issue that some charities have been able to handle devolution better than others."

Clarke adds: "If the organisation had taken key people into their confidence it is likely that we could have tried to assist them and explore ways to find a way through the problems. The way that the Children's Society has acted reflects a degree of arrogance that many people in the child care world are finding offensive.''

But many of the staff working on projects in England and Wales who are likely to see their work being undermined by the charity's cuts argue that good practice leads to social justice in a more direct way.

Jan Wyllie, project leader of the South Wales child protection advocacy project Ucan, which receives funding from the Children's Society and now faces an uncertain future, says that the charity is already working as a social justice organisation through good practice.

"By creating an environment where children's rights are listened to, they have already made a commitment to greater justice," Wyllie says. "Withdrawing from projects that are vital to vulnerable young people will not enhance social justice. Young people will be disillusioned by the Children's Society's actions when decisions to withdraw were made without consultation and without looking to children and young people or anyone else to find solutions."

Clarke agrees that the charity would be better advised to continue with the advocacy projects where they have expertise and where children and young people are given a voice that they would otherwise be denied. He says there are already several very effective lobby groups among the children's charities, and sees no need for one more.

As well as ending 113 years' service to young people in Wales, the society's plan of action will see cuts totalling £5.1m in England. As a result, several practitioners based in England, who did not want to be named at this stage because of uncertainty over their jobs, have raised queries about the management of the charity.

While acknowledging the difficulties associated with fund-raising, they say that steps should have been taken at a much earlier stage to try to halt the decline. On present figures, the society is likely to end the current financial year with a deficit of £4m. Over the past four years there have been deficits totalling £24m, and there is now only £13m remaining in general reserves - only enough to cover three and a half months' operating costs, according to society figures.

In Wales, the big question now is whether anything can be rescued from the winding down of a charity that has been helping children in Wales for more than a century. For the children's sake, the staff, and the Welsh assembly, all hope it can.

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Draft legislation currently going through parliament could undermine the existing right of adopted adults to find their birth parents. Terry Philpot reports.

Adoption is about creating a better life for children. We know that because the government repeatedly says so. But while 3,000 or so children a year are adopted from care today, there are millions of people who are still affected by the adoptions of yesterday: relatives, birth and adoptive parents, and adopted people themselves.

Those who passed the Children Act 1975 recognised this when they gave adopted adults in England and Wales the statutory means to search for their birth parents (the Scots had won this right in 1930; the Northern Irish gained it in 1989).

Under the 1975 act adopted adults who do not know their real name can obtain their birth certificate after undergoing the required counselling. The act’s aim was to pull back the coverlet of secrets and lies which had often cloaked adoption before then.

But the new Adoption and Children Bill published last month seeks to undo all of this. For if the relevant clause goes through (clause 54:4), it will put adopted people back where they were before 1975, or even where they were in the more closeted 1950s, says Natural Parents Network treasurer Veronica Agius.

The clause allows access to birth certificates and other information which identifies a third party - overwhelmingly the birth parents - to be restricted if the third party objects. It appeared in the new bill despite not having featured in the earlier bill which fell with the dissolution of parliament for the general election.

The clause not only cancels out the spirit and letter of the 1975 act, but threatens to re-create that state which the 1993 white paper, Adoption - The Future, took as having gone for ever when it observed that "in the past adoption was often a secretive process".

In the notes which accompany the bill there is a reference to a "new right" for an adopted adult to receive from an adoption agency information collected by it prior to adoption. But this right will be removed, it implies, if the information to be disclosed identifies other people and they object.

At the moment, agencies tend to exercise discretion when imparting third party information. The new provisions about birth information, though not retrospective, may create a less open climate, fears Julia Feast, project leader at the Children’s Society.

Those who framed the new legislation are ploughing up old ground. When the 1975 act was being debated it was said birth parents would be distressed if approached by their natural children - arguments that a quarter of a century of experience, practice and research have proven to be ill-founded.¹ The government shores up its case with reference to "some" unspecified complaints by birth parents. Yet, according to Agius "ninety-nine per cent of our members" are in favour of the current position.

But unless the new bill is amended during its passage through parliament, people adopted after its enactment will have fewer rights than those adopted before.

As we have come to realise, adoption is not a surgical separation of the adopted person from their birth family, nor is it a one-off, sticks-first-time attachment to their adoptive family. Rather, adopted people have a history which they are entitled to own as part of their life.

With these new provisions, there is a danger the government is once again focusing on the present at the expense of the past.

¹ D Howe and J Feast, Adoption, Search & Reunion, Children’s Society, 2000