I rise to reinforce the argument made by my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton). Possibly because I enjoyed the Christmas break too much, I did not fully follow the debate, and I am a little puzzled. On information, we heard some of the clearest and most eloquent testimony that I have ever heard in a Committee. I shall not bore hon. Members by repeating the points that my hon. Friend drew from that testimony.

People who have adopted have repeatedly made the point that it is crucial that they have all the information available on the child. I shall refer to a constituency case that I have mentioned before. The problems in that case did not relate to information, because the couple were given the information, but the Committee will be able to see what problems would have occurred had they not been given that information immediately on taking on the children.

The case involved two young lads, one of whom had been kept locked in a cellar for six years and was almost unable to speak; the other had been left outside in cold weather so frequently that he developed gangrene in both feet and came close to having to have them amputated, although in the end, doctors managed to save them. Knowing that he would become upset if he got at all cold, the mother would immediately warm his feet. That may sound a little bizarre, and is something that she would not have thought of had she not been given the facts of the case, but the boy found it very consoling.

The case of the poor boy who had been kept for six years in the cellar is more complicated. He had almost no ability to speak, and if the adoptive parents had not been told the ghastly circumstances in which the child had been kept by the people who had passed for his parents, he might have appeared to be completely stupid. In fact, there is no evidence that the child had any genetic failings: if one is shut off from all communication for the first six years of one's life, one does not learn to talk. It is a difficult challenge to teach a child aged six to talk.

My hon. Friend's two main arguments are crucial. First, full information must be provided and, secondly, it must be provided in good time. Our courts do not allow the introduction of hearsay evidence. Although Parliament is not controlled by that rule, I will not name names because of the seriousness of the matter. However, people involved in adoption for whom I have great respect tell me that—occasionally, and off the record—professionals have said, ''If we allowed the parents to have all the facts on some of these cases, we'd never get the little blighters adopted at all.'' That is a serious allegation to make about those professionals, but I shall not name names because I cannot actually prove that they said such a palpably untrue thing.

Every member of the Committee supports the central objective of the Bill, which is to get more children adopted. The sort of approach reflected in such remarks is completely unacceptable and wrong.

My saintly constituents who took on those two little boys knew everything about them—and there is not much worse that one can know about a child than that he was locked in the dark for six years and cannot talk. We owe the people who take on those potential emotional tragedies, turn them round and give them loving homes, the right to know everything that has gone wrong in the child's life, as far as the agency involved is able to provide that information.

I apologise for not going into more detail, but I am a little confused about the mechanics of what is going on. It strikes me as extraordinary that we are moving from tight original wording to much looser wording. I look forward to the Minister's response.