Why children are being taken from families now numbering 758,000

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I have just met a mother who had a home birth. She is a medical scientist who, after a few months ago, worked just along the road here. Her partner is a businessman who used to be an NHS pharmacist. They were introduced, rather quaintly I thought, at a dance in London and fell in love. Soon she was pregnant and the couple who have a really lovely flat, pristine flat on the south coast, decided to have a home birth there just literally a few weeks ago. I have seen photos of that event and a very beautiful little boy was born. They are amazing photographs showing the beginning of what should have been a happy family life together. That was until the involvement of the nearby hospital trust. A trust which was condemned recently for trying to stop a child having a life-saving proton therapy treatment for brain cancer. The family who you probably have heard of fled abroad and got that treatment for their child. After a series of disagreements about the home birth and whether an NHS midwife turned up on time, she didn’t, the couple found themselves drawn into a dispute with the hospital. Police appeared at their door. They were ordered to go to the hospital where their six-day-old son was removed from them and put into foster care where he remains today. The mother who had been breastfeeding her baby is now fighting through the secret family courts to get the child back. Of course, all the chances are that he will never be returned. Only a fraction of the children taken into care in England and Wales are ever given back to their birth families. The couple have been threatened with prison for putting a message on Facebook saying their child has been stolen by the state. They have, in other words, been silenced by the authorities who took their child. Every day the file on them gets bigger and bigger as the hospital and social workers and their lawyers build up a case against them. The father, one has to say, is outspoken. He is interested and be passionate about alternative medicine and will knock back down on this viewpoint. All this with the insistence on a home birth was enough to flag the couple up as difficult customers before the baby was even born. The couple are only allowed to see their baby under supervision for a few hours a week at a family centre. He is one of 65,000 children in care in England. One in five are babies or toddlers like him. The social workers I found out recently ominously call them bedside babies because so many are taken from their mothers at birth. So why did the baby of the home birth couple get taken away? Have they done anything wrong? The answer is no, in my opinion, and in the opinion of the Association for the Improvement of Maternity Services which alerted me to this tragic case. But what is clear is that this baby is perfect adoption material. And as I will demonstrate, he is worth a lot of money to foster carers and also to those who run lucrative adoption agencies. And it is money that is making this child protection racket go round. Let us take, first of all, the business of fostering. Every month a foster parent is paid a minimum of £500 to look after a baby before expenses are added. It is all tax free. There are plenty of takers. And what about adoption? A little publicised report last year contained some chilling insights into the UK adoption market. It said the Department for Education wanted the voluntary adoption agencies, of which there are many, to double the number of adoptions they managed from 800 to 2000 a year. To remind ourselves, as though any one of this room does not know, to be honest, a voluntary adoption agency searches out parents wanting to adopt. Then a local authority provides a child for those parents. It is rather like a dating agency. The local authority pays the adoption agency £27,000 for each new parent it pines for a child. If that adoptive parent takes five siblings, the payment to the agency is £80,000. Of course, for the money to keep on coming in, the voluntary agencies need the local authority’s social workers to keep up the flow of children. The report said staff at the voluntary adoption agencies are at least getting worried. UK attitudes to forced to be removing children, they told the people doing the report, they said that UK attitudes to forced to be removing children from their genetic parents were changing. Staff said adoption was under attack, with the media cherry picking negative stories and using damaging language about forced adoptions. They moaned on that judges, yes, those ones running the secret family courts, were leaning towards different kinds of placements for children. Revealingly, the report said staff are now concerned that the British model for adoption might be replaced by the European model, which rejects forced adoptions and gives more rights to the birth parents who don’t want to give up their children. Whoa, so there’s the secret. They are worried that more children might stay with their real families and there would be less money to be made out of adoption. One executive of a voluntary adoption agency quoted in this report said the market is changing as though he was talking about chocolate bars instead of human beings. Research in the US has found that children left in their own homes, even homes with great difficulties, do far better than if they enter the care system. They are less likely to become pregnant as teenagers, end up in the juvenile justice system and far more likely to hold down a job when they grow up. In our own country, children put in foster homes are rebelling. They simply go AWOL and in any one year, 13,000 do that. The adoption system is completely broken too. One in five of all adoptions fail. The social workers have a word for this. They call it in politically correct speech a disturbed adoption. In fact, the child is often just held back into the care system and left there. So why does the UK ignore this damning evidence? Can it be that money is involved? Let’s look at how much an agency can make from a local authority’s public purse when it finds a would be adoptive parent. Just recently, a particularly odious campaign, in my opinion, pioneered by the coalition government, invited investors to pour their money into a new adoption social finance bond. Under the new, and it’s such a crass title, it’s all about me scheme, adoption agencies get far more than the 27,000 pound fee for matching a parent to a child in care. They are getting money for providing 24 hour support to that adoptive parent during the first two years after adoption to stop the relationship breaking down because clearly so many do. The total payment by the local authority to the agency for this all-inclusive service is £54,000 per child. The total payment paid in four instalments. A grant to boost the scheme has come from the Social Outcomes Fund, a £20 million bucket of money set up by the coalition’s cabinet office. And of course, the investors will expect a decent return, I’m sure. The scheme’s blurb says this is a pioneering project that could provide a loving home to around 2,000 children in care dramatically improving their life chances. Well it might do, but what the hell are the children doing in care in the first place? But listen to what one of the scheme’s kingpins admitted in a newspaper interview. He said it was terribly hard to find parents for older children who had languished in the care system for years. He added, parents who want to adopt have a mindset about wanting a baby and tend to look for a young child. Then he added cynically the ones that go quickest are the youngest, the whitest and those without brothers and sisters. Then he added in a phrase that sticks in my gullet, if they are four or over, not terribly cute or in a sibling group, they tend to stick on the shelf. So while this scheme might be designed to help the stuck on the shelf kids, you can bet your last dollar that it will be the youngest, the cutest, who will sell like hot cakes. I can tell you that innocent sounding agencies are licensed to print money. One such outfit in the east of England was exposed by a freedom of information request recently. It had dealt, and this information came from the council itself, it had dealt with 179 children’s cases over three years and received, wait for it, well over six million pounds in fees from one council. It is a private company formed and owned by two former social workers. The agency’s mission statement admits a number of agencies like ours are now owned by private equity companies and have been sold on at a profit. Telling words indeed. No wonder that social workers are now hard at work to try to get their hands on the son of the couple whom I spoke of earlier. Council social workers who find a child for desperate adoptive parents may not actually get money from the deal, but I am sure they do get brownie points and promotions for doing so, and ahead of them of course is the prospect of a job at a private adoption agency where there is lots of money to be made. In the case of the home birth baby, who I spoke about earlier, social workers and the hospital staff have lied about the mother, embellished the weaknesses of the father and evidence has been fabricated in court from day one, from day one. In the end the industry will put that baby boy up for sale. A young and instant couple will be heartbroken for the rest of their lives. They probably never have another child or even be allowed to. As for their son, he will grow up thinking his mother who is fighting like a Tigress to get him back did not want him and just think of the damage that does to a human being. Bye.

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March 10, 2026