A Tory peer has condemned the Government for failing to include new adoption laws in this year's Queen's Speech.

Conservative frontbench spokesman Earl Howe protested over the lack of a Bill on adoption and said he understood that legislation on the issue was "some way off".

He also attacked the Government for using the Parliament Act to railroad a new law to reduce the age of consent for homosexuals which he believed could put children in care at greater risk of abuse.

"If there was one event over the last year which crystallised my views on the vexed issue of the age of homosexual consent, it was the publication of the Waterhouse report into the appalling catalogue of sexual abuse of children in care in Wales.

"Nevertheless the Government has taken their very firm stance on the age of homosexual consent in the interests of equality and because they do not believe it is right to be judgemental on a matter that largely relates, as they see it, to the way private individuals lead their own lives," he told the House of Lords this week.

Another Conservative peer Lord Kirkham made an impassioned maiden speech calling for more to be done to help children in care to stop them ending up unemployed, on the streets as prostitutes or in prison.

He told the Lords that he had been adopted and felt that it was probably his adoptive parents, Tom and Elsie and the values they gave him, that had ensured he, himself, had not fallen into crime.

He pledged to work in the Lords for a "better deal" for children in care and called on peers to work with him to help disadvantaged youngsters.