Ivana Bacik (Independent)

I thank the Minister of State for his response. In a way, I do not have as much of an objection to the test in the context of parents who are not married to each other or where, for example, a birth mother gives up a child for adoption. It is right that the test should be extremely rigorous in order for the adoption authority to be able to dispense with the consent. Clearly that is important. I am talking about children born within marriage because the parents have no entitlement or no capacity to consent under our present system. Indeed, before the 1988 Act — this is really a restatement of the 1988 position — there was no provision for children born within marriage to be adopted. I would like the Minister of State to explore the special guardianship option in greater depth. It is unfortunate that was not done in this Bill, given that there was such a long period of consultation leading up to the Bill and that this recommendation was put into the previous report in 2005 and in the 1984 report by the late Dr. Joseph Robins.

The reason special guardianship is so important is for the security of the child. The Minister of State rightly stated that in the case of children in their late teens an order may be made at that point. The difficulty arises for a younger child — these cases happen — who is facing the awful prospect of being moved between different foster carers or from foster carer to natural parent and back again to foster care. In this case the child has no degree of stability or security in his or her placement under foster care arrangements. As the Minister of State said, there has been some improvement in that foster parents can now apply for a passport for the child and so on, but there is still the prospect of the child being moved and this can be very disruptive for the child. Special guardianship offers a measure of greater stability and greater security for a child within the home of the people who are caring for him or her. Clearly adoption offers the greatest stability and security because it is the full order, but because of this difficulty about the children of marital parents, this very rigorous test is required to be fulfilled before a child born of a marriage can be adopted, even by his or her long-term foster parents.

I acknowledge that my amendment is not the right way to deal with this but some mechanism should be adopted, ideally in this Bill, to deal with this position. There is an attempt in section 54 to deal with the children who are in long-term foster care and who may have been born within marriage, therefore it may be very difficult to go through an adoption process. Indeed, the children and all concerned may not wish a full adoption. They may wish something more flexible where the natural parents can maintain contact. I would like to hear whether the Minister of State might anticipate looking again at section 115 of the UK Act.