The Liberal Democrat John Hemming has long campaigned against the courts taking children away from their natural parents on dubious grounds. (One wonders who will take up this cause in the Commons now that John has lost his Birmingham seat.) Too many of these children have gone on to be adopted elsewhere. Locally, we have the notorious case in which a child was unlawfully taken on United States soil in 1998 by officers of Neath Port Talbot social services.
In 2012 (the last year for which I can find statistics) in Wales as a whole there were 371 adoptions as a result of court orders (about 180 per million population) compared with 4835 (about 90 per million) in England. It could be that children are genuinely twice as much at risk in Wales as in England, but I doubt it. It is also probable that there are at least as many unjust removals as John Hemming and his group have detected in England.
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