Appendix II: How Some Agencies Answered an Enquiry from a Black Couple

As part of the preparation for writing this book I undertook a small study of how British adoption agencies would respond to an initial enquiry from a childless Black or mixed-race couple. I wrote to 19 agencies in England and Wales, taken from the list in the latest edition of Adopting a Child.

The letter stated that I was born in the Caribbean and my wife in the UK, and asked whether the agency had any Black social workers. The Christian name I used is one common for Black men and very uncommon for white men, but I did not explicitly give our ethnic origins. I stated that my wife had had several miscarriages and that we had decided to give up trying to have our own biological children. I gave our ages (late 30s), and that we were in good health, apart from my lame leg. We had been married for 15 years and lived with my mother-in-law. We knew there were few babies available and we were interested in an older child or brother-sister group under school age. I did not give our religion or anything about our finances or employment.

The agencies approached included four Christian denominational agencies, several of which I knew to have strict requirements about accepting only members in good standing of their own denominations. There were also four secular voluntary adoption societies, and 11 local authority social services departments. The local authorities included several near us (but not our own), some rural authorities and several urban areas with large Black populations. Nine letters included an SAE and 10 did not.

Six weeks after sending the letters, this was the state of play:

Replies had been received from 15 agencies, and including an SAE made no difference. Some of the agencies did not use the SAE in any case, because the information they sent back wouldn’t fit into my envelope.
The non-replying agencies included one secular voluntary agency (the national HQ of a multi-branch agency, where our local branch did reply), one semi-urban local authority agency a considerable distance away, and two large urban local authority agencies which I had expected to reply, because both of them have a pressing need for Black adoptive families. These urban agencies serve some of the poorest parts of the country.
Of the 15 agencies which did reply, the dates of answering my letter varied from almost by return to over four weeks after I sent my enquiry, although the three last were all from agencies which I expected to have very few Black children. The other 12 replies were all sent within a week of my letter.
The first five replies to come in were from religious and secular voluntary agencies.
Two replies (both voluntary agencies) stated that they no longer handle adoptions. One local authority forwarded my letter to the condominium agency which now provides their adoption service.
Although I did not mention our religion, one “strict” religious agency assumed we were not members, and refused to consider us. Further investigation revealed that bona fide members would initially approach them indirectly, through the local hierarchy.
Five other agencies (four local authorities and one voluntary) said we were outside their catchment areas and they could not assess us, although one local authority would assess us if we were interested in a particular child in their care.
One agency stated it was undergoing reorganisation and would contact us when they were in a position to consider new applications. (This agency and one of the uninterested agencies are well known for their shambolic social services, and both were deeply implicated in the North Wales Child Abuse enquiry of 1999-2000.) This agency wrote a month later, including a preliminary application form, although they were still not in a position to begin assessing new applicants. Three and a half months later again, they wrote to say they had decided not to accept any more assessments from outside their county. In their three letters to us they managed to misspell our name in two different ways. After that, I wouldn’t apply to them even if I lived next door; they seem even on a superficial level to deserve their bad reputation.
All the agencies which could not consider us now, with one exception, referred us to other agencies in one way or another, some giving good information, others giving out-of-date information, incorrect contact details, or vague generalisations.