I start by welcoming you to the Chair, Mr. Stevenson. We had a good debate on Tuesday while your co-Chairman, Mrs. Roe, was in the Chair.

Before I respond to the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), it may be useful to remind the Committee of the purposes of clauses 17 to 34. They introduce the new system of placement for adoption through adoption agencies, and significantly reform the legal process for adoption. One advantage of the proposals is that they will replace the legally unsatisfactory freeing provisions, so that birth parents can voluntarily relinquish their children for adoption. Freeing orders have been widely criticised. Once they are made, they leave the children legally without parents, and parental responsibility is transferred to the adoption agency. Many stakeholder groups have welcomed the abolition of freeing orders.

The new system ensures that substantial decisions about whether adoption is the right option for the child and whether the birth parents consent are taken earlier in the adoption process. Courts are involved where necessary. The Government believe that greater certainty and stability for children will be provided by dealing with the bulk of issues around consent to adoption before they are placed with their new families.

The new system will also be fairer to birth families who, under the current system, can be faced with a fait accompli at the final adoption order hearing if the child has already been with the prospective adopters for several months. The new provisions also minimise the uncertainty for prospective adopters and reduce the risk of their facing a contested final adoption order hearing. Once the issues around placement have been resolved, there are limits to the circumstances in which the adoption order may be opposed.

There are two routes to adoption through an adoption agency. The first route is through voluntary placement with parental consent, which is open to adoption agencies and local authorities. The second route is through placement for adoption under a placement order where there is no parental consent, and is open only to local authorities. Where a local authority is authorised to place a child for adoption with parental consent or under a placement order, subsection (2) provides that the child is to be considered a looked-after child to ensure that the local authority properly reviews and supervises the adoptive placement and promotes and safeguards the child's welfare. It will also mean that children placed for adoption will have access to the varied services for looked-after children, and should help to ensure that they are properly supported in the unfortunate event of the adoptive placement breaking down. Under subsection (4), placement has an extended meaning and covers placing a child with prospective adopters and, if a child has already been placed for other purposes—with a foster carer, for example—leaving the child with the carer as an approved prospective adopter.

Having considered some of the wider issues around placement provisions, I now turn to amendment No. 42. The Government believe that the amendment is unnecessary, because clause 1(4)(a) requires the agency, in deciding whether a child should be placed for adoption, to ascertain the child's wishes and feelings and to take them into account, in the light of their age and understanding, as part of the decision-making process. Clause 1(1) makes it clear that the obligations in the rest of clause 1 apply

``whenever a court or adoption agency is coming to a decision relating to the adoption of a child.''

Current regulations require an agency to make a decision based on advice from its adoption panel that adoption is in the child's best interest. Similar regulations will be made under the Bill, and they will set out the process for ensuring that the agency takes proper account of the child's view in the decision-making process, as it is obliged to by clause 1. The new adoption agencies regulations that will accompany the implementation of the Bill will place explicit obligations on agencies to consult the child, to record its views, to ensure that its views are considered in the decision-making process—for example, by adoption panels—and, if the child's views are not acted on, to record the reasons why not.