Adoptions can and do fail – cautiousness in the vetting process is taken in the hope of preventing further trauma to the child
Like Tony Blair before him (as is so often the case), David Cameron is urging local authorities to speed up the adoption process. Like Tony Blair before him, he'll find that this is more easily said than done. It is true that many people complain of the long period of vetting they undergo before they are allowed to adopt. But the reasons for this are not all the consequence of "PC gone mad" by any means.
The trouble is that in a lot of cases the children who need adoptive parents are already quite traumatised by the time things get to that stage. Adoptive parents need to be very tough and very committed. It is not so very unusual for an adoption to fail, and much of the cautiousness that social workers employ is in an effort to avoid the possibility of a child experiencing a second devastating family breakdown.
When politicians call for the adoption process to be speeded up, they are identifying a symptom of another difficulty – which is that very few babies are put up for adoption at birth. It would seem fairly brutal, a call to speed up the process whereby infants are removed from their natural parents. Anyone who watched BBC2's superb recent three-part documentary, Protecting Our Children, will understand that while even saying such a thing is hard enough, actually doing it is a very difficult, solemn and serious undertaking indeed.