UK Government apologises for its role in historic forced adoption

Posted on by Michael Lambert

A picture of a mother holding her child.

Today, the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer will apologise on behalf of the UK Government for its role in the historic forced adoption of children of unmarried mothers from the 1940s to the 1970s. By extension this apology should also be seen to cover birth mothers, adult adoptees and their families in Wales and Scotland, where apologies had been made in 2023, but where jurisdiction at that time rested with London rather than devolved administrations in Cardiff and Scotland, leaving them previously unfinished business.

Such an apology has been long in the making and is considerably overdue. It does, however, mark a momentous occasion in shifting public understanding of the past around adoption away from young mothers pressurised by parents into choosing to have their child adopted because they were born outside marriage, to the active role of the state and a range of public authorities in coercing young mothers to relinquish given the lack of meaningful alternatives. Abundant archival evidence demonstrating the hollowness of official rhetoric that mother and child were encouraged to remain together, when the reverse was the case.

Starmer’s words will mean a great deal to thousands who have internalised feelings of shame, sin, guilt, loss, grief, remorse and – particularly for adult adoptees – rejection and rootlessness. They recognise that children were not given but taken, solely because they were unmarried, and in the eyes of religious and public authorities, were unfit mothers by default. Institutional and organisational actors, and not just society, have acknowledged degrees of responsibility for this deep historic injustice.

The road to an apology

Today’s announcement has been long in the making and contested for more than a decade. Following the background to the 2012 Australian Senate Committee Report and the 2013 apology for historic forced adoption made by Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, the Movement for an Adoption Apology (MAA) was established. It was created out of the Natural Parents Network (NPN) by a peer support and advocacy group of birth mothers to campaign for a similar apology given that, in many ways, the Australian experience of historic forced adoption grew out of, and learned from, the UK experience.

In 2012, 2013 and 2014 early day motions were tabled and signed by supportive Members of Parliament (MPs), but support for an apology was not forthcoming until the 2016 ITV documentary Breaking the Silence aired. This led to apologies from the Salvation Army and the Catholic Church and wider public support. A subsequent 2018 Parliamentary Debate led by Alison McGovern and Stephen Twigg made the enormity of historic forced adoptions and their contemporary impacts clear, even asking if anyone had looked at historical government records. An apology was recognised to be overdue at the time, but none was forthcoming.

2021 marked a significant turning point, with the Irish Government issuing an apology for those incarcerated in mother and baby homes with their children forcibly adopted and a BBC documentary fronted by Duncan Kennedy. This provided the background to the Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) inquiry chaired by Harriet Harman from 2021-22, where I submitted written and oral evidence based on research associated with my doctoral thesis in history from Lancaster University. The subsequent report from the JCHR made a series of recommendations, including the need for a formal public apology for those affected.

The UK Government response to the JCHR report in 2023 said sorry ‘on behalf of society’, they did not ‘think it is appropriate for a formal Government apology to be given, since the state did not actively support these practices’. Whilst the UK Government chose not to apologise, both the Scottish and Welsh Governments made apologies in turn. At the time I said to MAA Chair Veronica Smith that the UK Government’s statement was ‘ahistorical, unfounded, and against a significant weight of academic opinion’, and that an apology was inevitable given the weight of evidence which made the case irrefutable.

Supporting campaigners including the UK Adult Adoptee Movement (AAM) formed in the wake of the 2022 JCHR report, I then proceeded to spend the next three years using the UK Government’s own records to show the scope, scale and extent of active state involvement in historic forced adoption. Many of these were reported by ITV’s award-winning Sarah Corker, who covered stories on the use of the carcinogenic synthetic oestrogen Diethylstilbesterol (DES) to suppress lactation in mother and baby homes, high infant mortality and unmarked graves in dozens of maternity homes, the extensive funding of mother and baby homes by the National Health Service (NHS), and the scandalous regime of St Monica’s Diocesan Maternity Home. A report I produced on St Monica’s for Cumbria Constabulary in relation to Judith and Stephen Holt, and the campaign by her widower Stephen Hindley for justice, was given extensive coverage by BBC NW earlier this year. I had the honour of standing by Stephen in 2025 as a plaque was unveiled at Parkside Cemetery in Kendal for those infants who died without recognition owing to the conditions inside the home.

Earlier this year, another day motion was tabled and signed, and the Education Committee held a series of private and public hearings on the lack of action taken by the UK Government and the Department for Education on other recommendations from the 2022 JCHR report. They used the opportunity of scrutiny in their 2026 Report to call for an apology, one with meaning, and one which included campaigners and survivors as part of a process rather than an event. This occasion led to the first public acknowledgement by the UK Government that the state ‘had a role’ in historic forced adoptions. The role of the church in these practices did not escape the attention of the Education Committee, with the Church of England issuing a formal apology a fortnight ago. The Church did not heed the advice of the Committee, favouring a statement full of caveats and conditions as part of a slick corporate video rather than listening to, or even including, campaigners.

With the case against the state irrefutable and a slew of organisations apologising, including the Methodist Church in 2025, the UK Government finally bowed to pressure, announcing an apology the day before that made by the Church of England. Decidedly overdue, news of an apology came too late to be heard by MAA stalwart Veronica Smith, who sadly died in 2024. Dozens of others who I have corresponded with over the past five years have also not survived to hear their pleas for justice vindicated.

Action speaks louder than words

The substance and meaning of formal apologies can only be measured by what actions are taken by institutions. To date, historic forced adoption apologies have mostly fallen short.

Australia was in the vanguard of issuing an apology and has made impressive steps around actions including centralising and listing records at the state level, and improved rights and access, and specialised training for health and welfare professionals working with adoptees based on significant research. The lack of a national structure and post-apology policy framework has inhibited action around DES, redress, and access to specialised mental health or reconnection services. State-level inquiries, reports and apologies have followed, but only as a result of further campaigning by birth mothers and adoptees.

In the UK, actions are noticeable mostly by their absence. The apologies by the Catholic Church and the Salvation Army produced no substantive measures, changes or outcomes, and represented institutional risk management rather than dialogue with campaigners. This should be seen as insensitive as best, insulting at worst. This model has continued with the recent Church of England apology. The words spoken by the Archbishop of Canterbury during her apology speech will undoubtedly have resonated given how faith permeates historic forced adoption: ‘You have nothing to be ashamed of; the shame is ours’. Such words are profoundly powerful given how sin and shame defined the experiences of thousands of birth mothers. However, the aloof, top-down, stage-managed process behind the apology makes much of that power hollow, with few commitments for associated actions beyond an outline of a possible redress scheme.

In the UK, the limitations of actions are associated with the way apologies have been framed as part of the legacy management of politicians. Again, Australia set the tone and pace, with Gillard leaving office less than six months after making the apology in 2013. In Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon publicly stood down as First Minister before her emotive apology was made in 2023. Following her departure actions have been found, with only a scoping study to show for the efforts of campaigners, and the influence of current adoption sector stakeholders – including Birthlink as an adoption intermediary fined by the Information Commissioners Office in 2025 for the destruction of unique records – diluting meaningful change. Under pressure to reduce budgets from the UK Government, marginal funding for adoption redress and actions in Scotland has been an easy target for politicians under a new First Minister.

Wales has proved something of an exception to date, taking active steps around records, reconnection, and mental health associated with separation trauma. Whilst tentative, I have been involved in fruitful conversations with the Methodist Church around records which reflect the seriousness with which an apology has been spoken and meant.

There is an opportunity for those inheriting the actions following Sir Keir Starmer’s words to take them seriously and take them forwards in earnest. In 2010 Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologised for the state’s role in the child migration schemes, exporting unaccompanied children across the frontiers of Empire only to be subject to widespread abuses about which the state and philanthropic agencies knew all too well. Whilst also decades overdue given the original campaigning by the Child Migrants Trust, the experiences of migrants fell within the remit of the English and Scottish abuse inquiries, and a state compensation scheme was established without stringent conditions of inclusion, which have beset actions following the apology in Ireland. It is worth noting that Brown has publicly backed calls for an adoption apology back in 2025.

The apology being given by Starmer is not the end, not even the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning. The case has been proven beyond reasonable doubt through a considerable volume of irrefutable experiential and archival evidence. It is the next steps which will show whether or not the apology is sincere and a substantive part of Starmer’s legacy, or a further blow to campaigners and their families.

Echoes across the globe

The UK Government is not the only one apologising for its role in historic forced adoptions on 2 July 2026. Following a similar process of campaigning pressure and a damning inquiry report, the Dutch Government is also issuing an apology on the same day. This puts the British experience in context, being part of the wider post-war ‘baby scoop era’ across much of the Western world from the 1940s to the 1970s. Whilst each context was specific with its own policy processes and architectures of church and state, the underlying principles of social engineering were remarkably similar across nations.

In the Netherlands as in the UK and Australia, unmarried women having children outside marriage were labelled sinful by the church or deviant by social workers. They were deemed unfit by definition, with forced removals and the adoption of their children by the authorities leading them to be placed with more upstanding, respectable and ‘normal’ adoptive parents. Such children were considered a ‘blank slate’ upon which adoptive parents could inscribe and socialise new identities. The pattern is painfully familiar for birth mothers, adult adoptees and in every instance the centrality of institutional actors rather than nebulous social pressure alone.

Although like the Church of England the Dutch Christian denominational authorities have recognised the harms caused, they continue to refuse to apologise for their comparable role. In the Netherlands however, the influence of social workers and psychological and psychiatric professions was much more marked. Relatedly, the role of professionals has only recently been acknowledged in many constituent countries even following formal apologies. Australia, again leading the way, with an unreserved apology being issued by the Australian Association of Social Workers in 2025.

Following the 2022 JCHR report the British Association of Social Workers (BASW) issued a very defensive statement in 2023similar in style and substance to the government reply which emphasised social values and parental pressure. Whilst BASW has supported calls for a formal state apology, they have not reflected on their own active role. The Moral Welfare Workers Association (MWWA), the representative body of church social workers at the heart of identifying unmarried mothers to have their children adopted was – after all – one of the founding bodies of BASW in 1970. Other social workers also readily subscribed to similar psychological understandings of unmarried mothers as incapable, advancing their professional status and interests through the application of casework principles. This case is also clear from the available archival evidence.

In recent weeks campaigners in Canada have ramped up activity in calling for a similar apology for historic forced adoptions, with an estimated 300,000 mothers estimated to have their children removed from the 1940s to the 1970s. Like Britain, such calls have been made for decades. More recently, a 2018 Senate report outlined the position of historic forced adoption in Canada, clearly acknowledging the harms inflicted and lifelong wounds carried by birth mothers, adult adoptees, and their extended families given continuing shame and secrecy. They recommended an apology should be issued. Unlike the Netherlands, the United Church of Canada issued a public apology in 2021, recognising their central role in running mother and baby homes and adoption agencies in an almost identical fashion to the UK.

To date, the Canadian Government have not signalled intentions to issue an apology. Given institutional and cultural similarities with Britain and Australia, such a position remains wholly untenable. Comparable research using archival sources at the state and federal levels making clear the case for an apology, which is already long overdue.

In pursuit of historical justice for children and families

The archival research I have unearthed from local, regional, national and religious sources over the past decade have made clear the scope, size and scale of institutional involvement in the historic forced adoption of children of unmarried mothers from the 1940s to the 1970s. Justice has been delayed by being denied, and the apology today marks an important milestone in securing recognition. Recognition that it happened here as much as Ireland, Australia, the Netherlands and Canada. This history is not just for the record but for the present. Tens of thousands of birth mothers and adoptees were impacted at the point of severance over the post-war decades, but the harm reaches into their families and extended families today. Questions of identity, health and family history, and complex connections across birth and adoptive families through reunion, its absence or refusal, are still unanswered. The milestone of an apology should mean that, with cooperation from institutional authorities, such questions can be heard and answered knowing they are a product of public policy, not private family tragedies.

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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