SAAM

SAAM Statement

(on behalf of the Adoptee Rights UK Campaign):

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Care Experience Reform, Keeping the Promise, and the Continued Exclusion of Adopted People**

The Scottish Adult Adoptee Movement (SAAM) — the adoptee-led core group behind the Adoptee Rights UK campaign — welcomes renewed parliamentary and public attention on care experience, including recent online commentary, care-focused written evidence, and proposed amendments to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill ahead of discussions in the House of Lords.

Adoptee Rights UK exists to address a long-standing gap in UK and devolved policy: the absence of enforceable, lifelong rights for people adopted through state intervention. SAAM brings together adult adoptees with lived experience and policy expertise to advance that campaign.

We recognise the value of care-experienced advocacy and the growing body of policy work aimed at improving outcomes for looked-after children and care leavers. This includes campaigning associated with Terry Galloway and the Care Leaver Offer, as well as wider public initiatives such as Fatima’s UK Campaign. These efforts have brought overdue attention to instability, trauma, and systemic failure within children’s social care.

We also acknowledge the role of Chris Law, who has spoken publicly in Parliament about forced adoption as a serious historical injustice and has acknowledged that he himself may have been affected by those practices.

That recognition matters.
But it also sharpens a long-standing contradiction.

What Care-Experienced Reform Now Looks Like

Across England and Scotland, care experience is increasingly being translated into concrete policy mechanisms, including:

• Local authority Care Leaver Offers setting out specific entitlements

• Council tax exemptions or reductions for care leavers up to age 25

• Procurement and social-value frameworks embedding care-leaver outcomes

• Central government departments signing Care Leaver Covenant commitments

• Cabinet-level decisions to treat care experience as a factor in Equality Impact Assessments

These measures show what happens when a group is explicitly named, defined, and designed for in policy and law.

However, none of these mechanisms address adoption.

Care Experience ≠ Adoption in Law

This distinction is not rhetorical. It is legal.

Adoption is not simply another form of care experience. It is the most permanent and irreversible state intervention a child can experience.

Once an adoption order is made:

• Care status ends

• Corporate parenting duties cease

• Care-leaver protections do not apply

• Safeguarding frameworks fall away

• State accountability is extinguished

Yet the consequences — identity change, record sealing, loss of legal family, and lifelong legal constraints — remain.

As a result, reforms that rely solely on care experience frameworks systematically exclude adopted people, even while referencing adoption historically.

SAAM and Adoptee Rights UK: Documented Policy Engagement

The exclusion of adopted people from current reform cannot be attributed to a lack of engagement by adoptees.

Through the Adoptee Rights UK campaign, SAAM and our adoptee-led ambassadors have engaged extensively with Scottish and UK policy processes, including:

• Formal submissions on the Universal Definition of Care Experience

• Evidence and recommendations to the Scottish Government’s forced adoption review

• Policy submissions on safeguarding gaps created by adoption law

• Engagement linked to The Promise and wider care reform

In our submission on the Universal Definition of Care Experience, we stated clearly:

“Care experienced should be understood to be lifelong, as Adoption Orders do not recess ‘previously looked after’ and must be included with any future definition.”

We also warned:

“The legal adoption process comes with life-altering legal changes and lifelong legal constraints affecting all adoptees… Any definition of care experience must reflect a lifelong perspective.”

Despite sustained, good-faith engagement, very little of this adoptee-led work is reflected in statutory duties or legislation.

Scotland Has Been Here Before

Scotland has already lived through the consequences of reform that recognises harm but fails to deliver remedy.

Following the Independent Care Review, Scotland committed to The Promise — a pledge to transform how children and families experience care, grounded in listening, accountability, and lifelong support.

As Scotland now grapples to keep The Promise, familiar patterns are re-emerging:

• Harm acknowledged, but legal responsibility limited

• Lived experience invited, but not reflected in outcomes

• Values articulated, while structural accountability stops short

Adoption sits precisely at this fault line.

The Scottish Government Bill: Stage 1 and a Critical Moment

The Children (Care, Care Experience and Services Planning) (Scotland) Bill is currently at Stage 1, where Parliament considers the Bill’s principles and long-term impact.

The Bill introduces important measures for people with care experience, including advocacy and services planning. But in Scottish law, adoption terminates care status.

Despite adoption being a permanent state intervention, the Bill:

• does not explicitly recognise adopted people as a distinct group

• does not extend duties or safeguards beyond the point of adoption

• does not address the lifelong legal consequences of adoption

Adoptees are repeatedly told they are “included” via care-experience language, while remaining excluded in statute.

This contradiction has been raised directly by SAAM ambassadors during consultation stages. It has not been resolved.

A Pattern, Not an Oversight

Across Scottish and UK reform, SAAM observes the same pattern:

• Adoption acknowledged historically, but excluded legally

• Adoptees consulted, but not reflected in outcomes

• Care experience broadened rhetorically, but narrowed in law

• Forced adoption named as an injustice, while its living consequences remain unaddressed

Recognition without remedy is not justice.

To speak about forced adoption in Parliament, while advancing frameworks that exclude adopted people as rights-holders, risks repeating the same structural erasure that caused the harm.

SAAM’s Position — and the Limits of Devolution

SAAM supports stronger protections for children in care and care leavers.
We support joined-up services, accountability, and lived-experience leadership.

But we will continue to state — clearly and respectfully — that:

Adoptee rights cannot be delivered through care frameworks alone.

Nor can they be fully delivered through devolved reform alone.

Scotland does not currently hold full competence to reform UK adoption law. While incorporation of the UNCRC is vital, it cannot by itself remedy the structural harms created by Adoption Acts that remain reserved to Westminster.

This means that without coordinated UK-level reform, Scotland risks repeating a familiar cycle: recognition, apology, and aspiration — without enforceable rights.

As Scotland works to keep The Promise, honesty about what can and cannot be achieved under devolution is essential.

SAAM, as the core adoptee-led group, will continue to work through the Adoptee Rights UK campaign — constructively, persistently, and publicly — to ensure adopted people are no longer recognised in principle but excluded in law.