That could happen only if the parents consent to it. That brings me to the restrictions and the safeguards that we need to place around the consent process, and the important matter of sharing parental responsibility.

When there is consent to placement for adoption, parental responsibility is given to the adoption agency and shared with the prospective adopters once the child is placed. However, in contrast to freeing orders, the birth parents will retain parental responsibility up to the final adoption order, although their ability to exercise it may be limited. I shall state what I believe are the justifiable reasons for that proposal in clause 24.

The sharing of parental responsibility once the child is placed will help the management of the placement by making it clear that the agency and the adopters have responsibility for the child and can make day-to-day decisions. It is appropriate for the adoption agency, which has overall responsibility for managing the placement, to be able to determine the extent to which the birth parents may exercise parental responsibility. However, I emphasise that parental responsibility has not been transferred but shared in such cases.

My hon. Friend also raised the important case of a child who is voluntarily accommodated, and spoke of his concerns about the removal provisions. We must be clear that a child who is voluntarily accommodated cannot be deemed to be placed for adoption with, for example, foster carers without the consent of the parents. When considering the 14-day removal period, we must remember the direction of travel. If a child is voluntarily accommodated to provide respite or support for the family, or to enable rehabilitation, it is right that the parents have their child returned directly to them when they ask for that voluntary accommodation to end.

However, it is different when the direction of travel is towards adoption. In such cases, the child would probably have been spoken to when they were first accommodated and prepared for leaving their original mother and father for a new family. The birth parents would still have the right to remove their consent for the placement, but if they did, the local authority would have 14 days either to return the child to the birth parents or consider whether it wanted to go through the placement order process. In that situation, 14 days would be reasonable, given that everything that the child would have experienced before that would have been geared towards adoption. It does not seem unreasonable to have a period of time within which that child could then be prepared to return to their parents. That is qualitatively different from voluntary accommodation with the intention that the child will be returned to their family.