Britain has been waiting decades for adoption reform and then - like buses - two Bills to overhaul the system come along at once.

A private member's Adoption Bill had its second reading the House of Commons yesterday - but received insufficient votes to proceed and therefore stands no chance of becoming law.

Tory MP Caroline Spelman's Bill came on top of the Government's own Adoption and Children Act which was given its second reading in the Commons on Monday.

Much of her Bill mirrored the aims of the Government's Bill including plans to speed up adoption, especially of younger children, and provide more support for adoptive parents.

It also aimed to prevent children being placed in as many as 20 different homes while in local authority care, she told MPs, cataloguing the appalling legacy of educational under-achievement, teenage pregnancy and crime among young people who had been in care.

"I feel very strongly that if more of those children had the opportunity of permanence in a family at an earlier stage, they might have a better life chance," she said.

She blamed "unnecessary bureaucratic delay" for getting in the way of finding many of the children a stable loving family and many youngsters had suffered as a result.

She quoted figures for the outcomes of children leaving care - with 70 per cent failing to achiev just one GCSE or GNVQ qualification and a quarter aged 14-16 regularly truanting.

Up to a quarter of teenage girls were leaving care either pregnant or as young mothers compared with the national average of just 3 per cent of 20-year-old women being mothers, said Mrs Spelman.

And more than a third of male prisoners under the age of 21 had been in care at some point in their lives.

Meanwhile children spent an average of one year and four months in care before a decision to place them for adoption was made and spent a further seven months before being placed with a family, she added.

Mrs Spelman pointed to the great variations in adoption provision across England and mentioned Kent as a county facing an unfair burden, with many London boroughs and authorities as far as the West Midlands sending children to the county for care.

Families who did go through with an adoption needed more financial and post-adoption support to cut the number of adoptions that failed - as many as one in five for older children, she said.

She warned that the Government's Bill had an unclear appeals system for prospective adopters and too much control in the process remained vested in social services departments which in many cases were the focus of blame for many of the current weaknesses in the system.

Her Bill, on the other hand, would introduce a genuinely independent procedure headed by an ombudsman with a chance for children to appeal, she said.

Another clause would force local authorities to fast-track children under three years of age into adoption to tackle what she claimed was a situation where younger children were being allowed to drift in care while departments concentrated on placing older children.

This was unfair on foster carers and babies because children forged strong bonds in the first years of life, she said.

Peter Lilley, former Tory Cabinet minister, warned that the children of young people who had been in care were 66 times more likely than the average child to end up in care, creating a cycle of deprivation.

Yet figures showed that adoptive parents proved to be better parents on average than natural parents in terms of their children's achievements and life chances.

He claimed there was an inbuilt bias against adoption in some social services departments, with prospective adoptive parents, often rejected and subjected to intense and degrading checks.

He also spoke of the long delays in care - even for babies - with children being about three-and-a-half when placed and five-and-a-half when finally adopted.

Yet some 80 per cent of these children had never been returned to their birth parents at any stage, he said.

Another Tory, Desmond Swayne also had a go at the poor record of local authorities in looking after children in care saying that many ten-year-olds in care had been in ten different foster homes.

"It's little wonder they emerge so damaged. We have abolished their childhood," he said. "There is a possibility that adoption delayed is adoption denied."

For the Liberal Democrats, Andrew Stunell, who has two adopted children of his own, welcomed the Bill, saying it was an area that cried out for reform.

Health Minister John Denham said the issues raised by Mrs Spelman's Bill could be more usefully raised as amendments to the Government's legislation.

See also

Council fears over Adoption Bill
Call for grandparent rights
New Bill clears the first hurdle
NORCAP condemns Adoption Bill
Adoption Bill pledges support