Getting tough with councils on adoption

by Amit Roy

‘ADOPT BERKSHIRE’S REFUSAL TO ALLOW INTERRACIAL ADOPTION IS WRONG’

As with the council leadership at Kensington & Chelsea, the senior management of Adopt Berkshire, which handles adoption on behalf of the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, needs to be either sacked or replaced.

It has failed in its primary duty of finding good homes for children in need.

It has told a Sikh couple in their thirties, Sandeep and Reena Mander, that white children cannot be place in their care because of their “cultural heritage” and that their best bet is to go to India.

How utterly racist.

“The way we’ve been bought up, the race of the baby never really entered our mind,” says Reena.

The couple, who were born in Britain of Sikh parents, are considered perfect in every other way but Adopt Berkshire still will not even put them on its books.

Backed by their local MP in Maidenhead, Theresa May (who spoke earlier this year of her sadness at being able to have children herself), and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the couple are taking legal action.

Adopt Berkshire, which won’t comment on the case – shades here again of Kensington & Chelsea – is breaking its own rules. These state that while all every effort should be made to place children with couples of a similar ethnicity, people from a different culture should not be ruled out.

Baroness Shreela Flather, 83, a former mayor of the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, expressed strong disapproval of the decision taken by Adopt Berkshire.

“This is a bad decision,” said Shreela, who lives in Maidenhead and has taken the title, Baroness Flather, of Windsor and Maidenhead in the Royal County of Berkshire.

“If you do this, you are separating people,” she pointed out. “If there are good people and children need homes, they should not be banned.”

She also said that “in India it is more usual to adopt within the family – if your brother has two children and you have none, you might take one. But here without the extended family, this is not possible.”

All we need to do is to ask a simple question: it is better for a child – any child – to live in limbo, unloved and with no home than to be given a chance to flourish in the care of the Manders?

Adopt Berkshire’s racist attitudes should not be allowed to pass unchallenged. And its senior executives should be asked to stand down.