Ministers have been urged to digitise records essential to reuniting families separated by the UK’s unmarried mothers’ home scandal by campaigners who fear they could be lost in Angela Rayner’s local government reorganisation project.
Hundreds of thousands of British women were coerced to give up babies at church-linked homes, which worked alongside statutory agencies, between the 1940s and 1980s.
This week, ITV’s Long Lost Family: The Mother and Baby Home Scandal will feature the searches of people – including mixed-race and disabled adoptees – affected by forced adoptions, which the UK government has refused to formally apologise for.
Away from the cameras, campaigners say digitising records across the UK will help survivors struggling to trace relatives and reveal the risk of inherited health conditions or from anti-lactation drugs used in homes.
The Movement for an Adoption Apology (MAA), which fears records could be destroyed in the plans to merge English local authorities , has written to the families minister, Janet Daby, calling for digitised archives.
However in a letter seen by the Guardian, Daby said while “the feasibility of digitising records” had been considered, “the scale and cost … make it unachievable within current resources”.
Westminster’s approach contrasts with that of the devolved administrations. Northern Ireland’s Truth Recovery Independent Panel this week revealed it had digitised more than 5,500 records from unmarried mothers’ institutions and planned a permanent archive. In Scotland, the first minister, John Swinney, has committed to working with MAA on an oral history project.
Responding to MAA’s letter in June, Daby said she understood the “historical significance and emotional importance” of adoption records. The minister said officials had written “to all directors of children’s services across England” and regional and voluntary adoption agencies “who may hold similar records”, urging them “to retain all adoption records they hold from 1948 and earlier”, and was planning a consultation to extend the statutory retention period from 75 years to 100 years. The UK government’s stance is that legal responsibility for records remains with councils.
MAA believes this does not go far enough. In July the Information Commissioner’s Office fined the adoption support charity Birthlink £18,000 for destroying 4,900 records linked to adoptions in Scotland to clear space. This prompted MAA to write to the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, saying it was “gravely worried similar tragic losses are occurring”, and asking to meet and be included in shaping new legislation. MAA awaits a response from Phillipson.
The writer and MAA campaigner Karen Constantine said: “We need a more supportive system for people to access their files and recognition from the government that this is important history we need to capture. The current approach of UK government is indirect sex discrimination – they aren’t taking women seriously. With funds under pressure local government reorganisation could lead to chaos for records.
“In my research I’ve found younger generations are now seeking to unravel family history because the trauma has travelled down, and there are more people finding out they are the children of men who fathered siblings born in different homes. There were clear cases of rape and women and girls were punished for it in a system which involved the commodification of children and human trafficking in the UK.”
A government spokesperson said: “This abhorrent practice should never have taken place, and our deepest sympathies are with all those affected. We take this issue extremely seriously and continue to engage with those affected to provide support.”
Long Lost Family’s two-part special, airing at 9pm on 3 and 4 September, says: “For too long the story of unmarried mothers was seen as something that was happening only in Ireland. But now we’re beginning to wake up to the enormity of what happened right here in England.”
