185,000 babies taken, no compensation

Ann Lloyd Keen was 17 when she gave birth without pain relief in a Swansea mother and baby home in 1966. A staff member told her: “You will remember the pain because you’ve been a bad girl.” A midwife let her keep her son for ten days, warning her not to get too close. On the eighth day he was gone. “His new mum is coming for him,” the midwife told her, “and you won’t see him again.”

Keir Starmer apologised to Ann Keen and mothers like her in the House of Commons on Thursday, calling forced adoption “a stain on our history” and saying the government was “deeply and profoundly sorry.” He announced £4m of support, spread over three years, for records access, reunion services and counselling. He ruled out compensation.

An estimated 185,000 babies taken

Between 1949 and 1976, an estimated 185,000 babies were removed from unmarried mothers in England and Wales, according to the government’s own figures. Other estimates put the number of women affected at around 250,000 between 1940 and 1980. Under the law before the 1976 Adoption Act, a mother’s consent to give up her child could be dispensed with on the sole basis that she was unmarried.

Cambridge academic Professor Gordon Harold told the Education Committee this year that the state was “in the engine room of those practices, if not necessarily at the wheel,” a system “designed to punish and place,” amounting to what he called “chronic, calculated trauma delivery.”

Guardian journalist David Batty, adopted from a north London Baptist home in 1974, has written that his first mother, then 20, was recorded by the presiding reverend as “a rebellious daughter” and “a determined but probably disturbed girl.” One agency still withholds his file. Sally Ells, co-founder of the Adult Adoptee Movement, said the loss of her original family “was never acknowledged” and that she “felt alien throughout my childhood.”

Sorry, but not paying

A parliamentary committee recommended this apology in 2023. Rishi Sunak’s government rejected it. England is the last of the UK nations to apologise, years behind Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Australia, some of which paired their apologies with redress schemes. Many of the mothers and adoptees this affected have already died waiting.

Ministers say liability is too diffuse to compensate, spread across councils, charities and the Church of England, which ran roughly 200 mother and baby homes itself. Australia found a way regardless. Diffuse responsibility is a reason to fund redress properly, not a reason to offer words instead of money.

The Movement for an Adoption Apology called the statement “a positive step for the hundreds of thousands of mothers still living with loss.” It is also, measured against fifty years of stolen children, £4m and no cheque.

The machine is still running

Early-intervention support for birth families under strain has been cut through more than a decade of austerity, and Britain still separates children from parents without consent at a higher rate than most of Europe. The system that took Ann Keen’s son has not been dismantled. It has been renamed, underfunded, and left running.