On Friday 27th March the Education Committee published its report into historic forced adoption. It heard evidence from academics – including myself – adoption organisations, adoptees and birth mothers, and the Minister for Children and Families. It deliberated and published its findings rapidly, recognising the urgency to act given the ageing condition of many of those impacted by historic forced adoptions.

Among its conclusions, the Education Committee affirmed the need for the UK Government to issue an ‘unqualified, formal apology to all those affected’. This conclusion was broadly similar to the 2022 Joint Committee on Human Rights inquiry. This report deemed forced adoption a violation of family life; that around 185,000 mostly young, unmarried girls and women in England and Wales from the 1940s to the 1970s had their children removed because of this status alone. The UK Government response at the time, release nine months later in 2023, concluded that whilst what happened was regrettable, a formal apology was not possible as ‘the state did not actively support these practices’.

This judgment delayed the report’s recommendations of the need for a formal, public apology. It also underestimated the scale of forced adoption, at around 250,000 across the UK over the same period. In the meantime, one of its principal campaigners, a mother whose child was forcibly taken from her in the 1960s solely because she was unmarried, died. During this time apologies were made by devolved governments in Scotland and Wales, although both remain unfinished business until the UK Government acts given it had legal responsibility at that time despite some policy decentralisation.

However, for the first time, the Education Committee’s report also recommends that the UK Government should also ‘formally and publicly recognise that the state played a central role in enabling and sustaining historical forced adoption practices’.

This recommendation sits alongside remarks made by the Minister for Children and Families, Josh MacAlister MP made during the Education Committee’s evidence hearings that ‘the state had a role’ which have been subsequently repeated. Today the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, also said his ‘instinct’ recognised the role of the state and the need for an apology. Although such an apology should, if extended, be done properly rather than in haste. In 2016 the Catholic Church issued an apology without any actions beyond words and the Scottish Government apology in 2023 has since petered out since the departure of Nicola Sturgeon, who issued the apology, as First Minister.

For the first time in the history of the campaign for an adoption apology, there is an alignment between parliamentary understanding and analysis of the lifelong harms of historic forced adoption in the present, and political acceptance of the state’s involvement.

Underpinning this is a recognition that the experiences described by mothers – which can be deeply retraumatising when asked to be told and retold as identified in the Education Committee’s report – have common elements. Although experienced as private, personal tragedies of family rejection, social stigma, community shame and often sin, there was a much larger set of institutions which sat behind these experiences. This is the basis of my research.

The state was central. It limited welfare alternatives for mothers to live independently, restricting benefits, access to childcare, and housing. They did not experience affluence and social security offered to others by the post-war welfare state. The state did, however, extend its support to adoption and mother and baby homes as the best way of dealing with the ‘problem’ of illegitimacy by pouring large sums of money into subsidising the system. The regulation of the Adoption Acts, which can be meticulously followed through the back-and-forth between adoption agencies, local children’s services and other government departments, also recognised how such decisions were far from free and informed, and that notions of choice for mothers placed in such a position was illusory at best, meaningless at worst. As I said to the Education Committee, ‘coercion was baked into the entire system’.

The state was not alone. The Church of England was the main beneficiary of state largesse through subsidies for homes and social workers. With a new Archbishop of Canterbury, perhaps the positive signals from the UK Government may also enable the Church to reflect on its historical role and accountability in the present. The same is true for many other voluntary organisations at the time, many of which remain involved in either adoption or social welfare activities today. The social work profession has not had a historical reckoning which has taken place in Australia. Their professional association apologised unreservedly in 2025, 12 years after the formal apology was given by Prime Minister Julia Gillard. To date, the position of the British Association of Social Workers has been as defensive as many other institutions looking to blame society rather than their own active involvement.

The alignment between parliamentary and political will affords an opportunity for justice to be obtained for the thousands of mothers, adoptees, and their extended families who are affected by this scandal. The state was actively and inescapably involved. An apology is long overdue and delays to justice have so far denied it. However, as other examples show, an apology is not words alone, but as adoptee Vik Fielder says, the ‘first step’ towards healing such deeply felt and lived trauma. There is a real opportunity, and seemingly now willingness from those within government, to take this tentative but vital first step towards truth and justice.

Dr Michael Lambert is a Lecturer in Medical Humanities at Lancaster University and a historian of the welfare state, specialising in social and health policy in twentieth-century Britain. His research focuses on inequality, welfare institutions, and the lived impacts of policies, including extensive work on mother and baby homes and historic forced adoption. He has contributed evidence to Parliament and public debates on these issues, bringing historical insight to contemporary policy discussions.

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