Adoption Allowances in Scotland: Four Years on

It is now four years since section 32 of the Children Act 1975 was implemented in February 1982. This made it possible for adoption agencies to submit schemes to central government for approval which would enable them to pay allowances to adopters in certain specified circumstances. It represented a major change in adoption policy by reversing the previous prohibition on payments to adopters. These had been made illegal about half a century ago as a reaction to poor child care standards and commercial motivations which had been observed in some adoptive placements in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the next 50 years, the adoption scene changed dramatically, but for the vast majority of people it came to be taken for granted that adoption was something which involved taking on full responsibility for a child in every sense, including the financial one. It is not surprising therefore that when the idea of adoption allowances was first considered by the Houghton Committee, and then by Parliament, views about their desirability were sharply divided. Here we report some recent research findings which illuminate how far people's hopes or fears were borne out in practice.