Government to "name and shame" authorities over adoption placement performance

The government is to “name and shame” local authorities that perform badly in placing children with adoptive parents, according to a report in the Sunday Telegraph.

The paper also claimed that ministers “will impose a fixed time limit of six months for a child’s care proceedings to be sorted out”.

Ministers have suggested that the average time for a child being taken into care and being adopted was – at two years and seven months – “unacceptably long”.

The new requirements will mean that local authorities will have to provide more regular and transparent reports about their peformance.

At the Conservative party conference earlier this month, the Prime Minister David Cameron described the fact that only 60 babies under the age of one were adopted out of 3,600 in care as “a scandal”.