Adoption review to challenge age limits: White Paper emphasises need for 'common sense'

AGE should be no bar to adoption, local authorities will be told this week when the Department of Health unveils a White Paper.

Health ministers are keen to tackle the attitude of some local authorities that has led potential adoptive parents to fear they would be ruled out for being 'fat and 40'.

It follows a row over one couple who were denied adoption after being diagnosed as obese. Such couples could still be ruled out on health grounds in the future, but the White Paper will emphasise the importance of care, and a loving background, rather than stereotyping, in assessing fitness to adopt.

Virginia Bottomley, the Secretary of State for Health, and a former social worker, said she wanted to see social workers use 'more common sense' when making assessments after a series of rows about mixed-race adoptions.

Two white adoptive parents of a black six-year-old girl said they had been told they had done a disservice to the child by adopting her. Another mixed-race couple were told they could not adopt a mixed-race child and were 'racially naive' after telling officials they had not experienced racial abuse.

The White Paper, to be published on Wednesday, was delayed for three months, after Mrs Bottomley was forced to back down over plans to give local authorities the right to impose fees, according to what they thought couples could afford, for adoption of children.

Charging had been proposed in an earlier government consultation document, but the row it caused in July led to the idea being hastily dropped.

John Bowis, the Under-Secretary of State for Health, involved in the charging controversy, will make it clear local authorities will still be able to charge couples for adopting children from other countries. Charges up to pounds 1,500 are already imposed by some local authorities to cover the cost of assessments by social workers of the prospective adoptive parents'.

The go-ahead for the charges for other inter-country adoptions may be seen as an attempt to deter would-be adoptive parents from bringing back orphans from war- stricken areas of Europe.

Officials at the Department of Health said there had been a surge in interest in the children of Romania, after the fall of the Communist regime, but adoption cases were now small in number, and there was little pressure for adoptions from other former Communist countries, such as Albania.

The White Paper will herald the biggest overhaul of the law since the 1958 Adoption Act and will give teenage children more influence over their own futures.