10. Statement by the Minister for Children, Older People and Social Care: Adoption Week

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:46 pm on 16 October 2018.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Huw Irranca-Davies Huw Irranca-Davies Labour 6:46, 16 October 2018

Just to raise to Assembly Members' understanding, we have a couple of pieces of consultation currently live in the field of adoption legislation, and they're to do with actually speeding up the process. There's the first, which covers the new regulations required, which flow on from the risk regulations. And the second covers the proposed introduction of the two-stage system for assessing and approving adopters, which covers some of the points that you were raising there, but it's also focusing on reducing the timescale within which children and approved prospective adopters have their details added to the register for Wales to a maximum of one month, which would be a huge leap forward.

Many of the points that you raised in terms of the criteria for adoptive families I haven't actually had raised with me as major issues. It's been more to do with actually matching up the right family with the right child or young person; it hasn't been to do with mortgages, and so on. But I'll go away and look at that, and I'll write to the Member on it. She asked what confidence we have in driving this forward. We do have that confidence—one, because of the performance improvement that we can see already, but also because we have the national framework in place, because we have now a strategic national outlook with the national service, and because we have assessment going on of what we are doing as well. But I'll happily write to you on the issue that you raised to do with security of tenure. I would come back to the point that I said to Dai as well: everything we do within this sphere is always with the best interests of the child paramount, first and foremost, as well as matching with adoptive families. But I'll write to you on that issue, because it hasn't been raised with me before, and it hasn't come up as a problem, so I'll go away and find out if it is. If you have any particular examples of where that's been a problem, I'd be happy if you shared them with me too.