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The right of adopted people to search for their birth parents, accorded them by the Children Act 1975, recognised what is now commonplace: their right to know their origins.

While no one would deny adopted people these rights, birth parents (largely birth mothers) have remained in the shadows. Often their only link is through the unrecognised efforts of campaigners who for years have been striving for a corresponding right for a parent to search for their child, or at the very least know how the child is doing.


In July, the campaign reached its most hopeful point for years when the House of Lords grand committee rejected a government olive branch in exchange for dropping amendments to the Adoption and Children Bill that would give adoption support agencies (in effect specialist off-shoots of voluntary agencies) a legislative framework to provide intermediary services for birth relatives. The amendments, which will now go to the third reading and report stage in the Lords after the summer recess, would let adopted people know of their birth relatives' interest in making contact.

The government's compromise looked unenticing at best: advertising the Adoption Contact Register, funding an intermediary service, and issuing new guidance on how agencies should respond to requests for information.

Pam Hodgkins, founder of Norcap, which supports adults affected by adoption and advocates changes, says: "I feel more positive now than I have done for a long time."

Campaigners believe it is simple justice to give birth parents some legal equality with their children but the government is hostile to such changes. However, time and the peculiarities of the legislative timetable may be on the reformers' side.

The government may feel reluctant to challenge a positive Lords vote on the amendments if only because it would entangle the bill in more parliamentary red tape, wasting precious time - unless it receives the royal assent in November, the bill will be cast onto the parliamentary scrap heap.

If the amendments do go through, England and Wales will join Australia, New Zealand and most of Canada in recognising this right for birth relatives to have access to intermediary services, although in Australia and New Zealand there is a right to identifying information that would not be available here. If Ireland can extricate its own reform proposals from their current impasse, it will also enjoy this right.

The first demand for these rights, made by Norcap more than 10 years ago, was provoked by discussion then taking placing on what became the Children Act 1989.

Norcap's initial agitation seemed to be bearing fruit. In the early 1990s, the report to ministers of the inter-departmental committee on adoption legislation, a part of which became the abortive Adoption Review, reported favourably. "But since then," says Pam Hodgkins, "the issue has disappeared entirely."

But before today's campaigners succeed in establishing a statutory right, they have to save an existing one. Section 50(5) of the Adoption Act 1976 allows an application to the high court for the registrar-general to make available matched birth and adoption entries from his records. Unless the amendments are included in the bill, this right will be lost because the 1976 act will be superseded by the provisions in the new Adoption and Children Act.

"I wanted the situation to get better with the amendments," says Pam Hodgkins. "I never thought I would see it get worse."

For years birth parents whose children were placed by voluntary agencies have been helped informally to make contact through the intermediary services, one of the most extensive of which is run by the Children's Society.

But apart from the lack of a statutory right to information, one of the barriers to making contact is that such assistance is by no means universal and is not safely enshrined in law. Consequently, intermediary services offered by local authorities are patchy - in 2000 half of them provided none at all.

Although in 1990 the Department of Health and the Social Services Inspectorate agreed that it was lawful to offer such services, what we have now is a service with no statutory right, no central agency, no framework and certainly no encouragement.

The DoH published practice guidelines, developed by the Children's Society, for intermediary agencies in 2000¹ but has since remained quiet.


The Adoption Contact Register, created in 1991 and run by the registrar-general, had 18,276 adopted people and 8,007 birth relatives registered in November 2000. It has been spectacularly unsuccessful in bringing people together: there have been only 490 successful matches.² Given that it is never advertised, it is hardly surprising that most people have no idea that it exists.

Many of the arguments against granting birth parents the right to search are similar to those raised during the debate over whether to give adopted people similar rights. These include possible disruption within the adoptive family and also distress experienced by adopted people who are contacted. Subsequent research has disproved these arguments.

However, health minister Jacqui Smith is not keen on changes to the law. In her introduction to the Adoption Support Framework, she recognised that adults have needs when it comes to adoption but that the government's policy intentions are to meet the needs of children who require adoption.

The minister's objections are based on concerns that changes would deflect local authorities from the government's priority of pushing up the number of adoptions, and that false expectations would be raised.

She says that some records are incomplete or missing, that the adoption standards create even greater openness, that a "sizeable" number of people might not know they were adopted, and that there would be a great demand for the service.

Norcap and the Children's Society disagree. They argue that stand-alone agencies, backed by fees or supported by charitable funds, and listed by the registrar-general, would avoid administrative burdens being placed on local authorities.

The registrar-general's records are complete and modern methods for storing and retrieving information (such as electoral registers on CD-Rom) make tracing easier. The adoption standards do make for greater openness but only for children adopted after the records were created.

Only 3 per cent of people are believed not to know that they are adopted and a veto register would ensure that unwanted contact was not made. In these cases only non-identifying information would be available to searchers.

While demand could be large at first, experience shows that it would diminish with time.

While the 1975 act was retrospective, Smith objects to any changes to the bill being so. The irony is, of course, that many mothers who have given their children up for adoption since 1975 would not require the service because of present-day greater openness.

Julia Feast, project manager for post-adoption, care and counselling at the Children's Society and a leading member of the campaign for changes, says: "We are particularly concerned about many of those women who gave up their children before 1975 - often unwillingly - and who are now in late middle age or are elderly."

Last April, in a high court judgement concerning triplets separated by adoption in 1932, Mr Justice Sumner, said: "We are still faced with an urgent need to review the legislation that impedes birth relatives' opportunities for search and reunion."

The triplets were able to obtain information about their matched adoptive and birth names from the registrar-general's records. It is a cruel irony that this information would no longer be available to them if the bill is not amended.

¹ Department of Health, Intermediary Services for Birth Relatives: Practice Guidelines, DoH, 2000

² Department of Health, National Statistics: Adoptees and Relatives Who Wish to Contact One Another: The Adoption Contact Register, DoH, 2001