A billion-pound oversight: how local authorities in England are failing to secure adoptions

Originally published 8 July 2024. Updated November 2025 with data through Q2 2025.

Every year in England, local authorities decide that adoption is the best option for around 4,000 children in care. These are children who cannot return to their birth families, children who need permanent homes and families who will love them into adulthood and beyond.

Yet a quarter of these children — roughly 1,000 every year — will never be adopted.

The human cost is obvious. The financial cost is also large, and worth being precise about: local authorities are spending over £1 billion a year on avoidable care costs because these children aren't placed. That figure is based on 2022 prices; with care costs rising faster than inflation, the real cost today is higher. Each successful adoption saves a local authority over £1 million across a child's lifetime compared to keeping them in long-term foster or residential care.

So why aren't these children being adopted?

The growing crisis

England currently has around 83,600 children in care — a 22% increase over the past decade. At the same time, adoption rates have collapsed. In 2015, 5,340 children were adopted. By mid-2025, that number had fallen to just 2,930 a year — a 45% drop.

The number of families approved to adopt has fallen even faster. In the year to June 2015, 5,060 families were approved. By the year to June 2025, that figure had dropped to 2,250 — a 56% fall.

Rather than using adoption to address the growing care crisis, local authorities are abandoning it as a solution.

The number of looked after children has increased by 22% over the past decade

The adoption process — and where it breaks down

When a local authority determines a child cannot return to their birth family, an Agency Decision Maker makes a "best interest decision" that adoption is the right path. The next step is obtaining a placement order from the family court, which authorises the adoption process to begin.

Then comes the search for an adoptive family. Once a match is found, the child moves in, and after several months to a year, the family can apply for an adoption order that legally completes the adoption.

Analysis of Department for Education data shows that only about 74% of best interest decisions result in actual adoptions, when accounting for the typical nine-quarter lag between decision and adoption order.

That's over 1,000 children a year who were supposed to be adopted but aren't.

Both the number of children adopted and families approved to adopt have fallen dramatically since 2015

The cost of failure

Each successful adoption saves the local authority roughly £1,073,022 over the child's lifetime, compared to alternative care arrangements. The figure comes from a 2022 study commissioned by the Consortium for Voluntary Adoption Agencies.

The saving comes from a simple structural difference: adoptive parents don't receive ongoing allowances from local authorities. Once the adoption order is finalised, only a small proportion of families need occasional support.

Children in foster care, by contrast, generate continuing costs. Weekly allowances for foster carers, plus fees to private fostering agencies that can reach tens of thousands of pounds a year per child. When children reach around 10 years old and foster placements become harder to find, they often move to residential care — which costs approximately £300,000 per child per year.

With around 1,000 children a year not being adopted despite a best interest decision, local authorities across England are incurring unnecessary costs of over £1 billion a year.

That figure is based on 2022 costs. Fostering fees and residential care costs have risen faster than inflation since, so the real figure in 2025 is significantly higher. And these numbers are for England alone — they exclude Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.

Why children aren't being adopted

Several factors contribute to this failure.

Fewer families being approved

The number of families approved to adopt has fallen by 56% since 2015. Both local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies have cut recruitment significantly. As the number of children in care rises, the pool of potential adopters shrinks.

Only 74% of best interest decisions result in adoptions, leaving approximately 1,000 children annually without families

The voluntary sector is disappearing

Voluntary adoption agencies — independent, not-for-profit organisations that recruit and train adopters — have been disappearing. In 2015 there were around 25 voluntary agencies in England and Wales. By June 2025, only 11 remained.

These agencies play a crucial role. They work with children from local authorities across the entire country, not just one region. Jigsaw, for example, has placed children from 50 different local authorities and regional adoption agencies. Families who adopt through a local authority typically only have access to children from that single authority.

But voluntary agencies are funded almost entirely through interagency fees — payments from local authorities when children are placed with families the agency has trained and approved. These fees have been increased over time, but they often don't cover the agencies' operational costs. The bureaucratic, heavily regulated approval process is lengthy and expensive to administer.

To put this in perspective: the interagency fee for placing two children is approximately £63,550. This is a one-off payment that covers the lifetime cost of the adoption. Compare it to residential care, which costs around £600,000 a year for two children. Even at £63,000, the fee structure isn't financially viable for many voluntary agencies — and so they close, reducing placement options for the children who are hardest to place.

Both local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies have dramatically reduced the number of families they approve

The mismatch between adopters and children

Most families looking to adopt have experienced infertility and naturally hope to adopt a baby. The reality is starkly different. In the year to June 2025, only 134 children under the age of one were adopted across all of England and Wales.

The children actually waiting for adoption are older. As of June 2025, just over half — 50.6% — are in sibling groups of two or more.

This creates a fundamental mismatch. Many approved adoptive families never have children placed with them. Almost one in five remain childless despite being approved.

The bedroom problem

This is where local authority practice makes a bad situation worse.

Around half of the children waiting to be adopted are in sibling groups. Local authorities will not place siblings with a family unless there is one spare bedroom per child. This isn't a legal requirement — it's a rule that social workers have decided to enforce.

The 2014 National Minimum Standards for Adoption (Standard 9.1) require that children have "enough space". They don't specify separate bedrooms. Yet local authorities rigidly apply their own bedroom rule.

To adopt two siblings, then, a family must live in a three-bedroom home. To adopt three siblings, they need a four-bedroom home.

In today's housing market — particularly in the South and South East of England — this is a massive barrier. At Jigsaw we turn away around a third of the families who approach us because they only have one spare bedroom. These are people who could provide loving homes and are excluded by an arbitrary policy.

We once worked with a local authority that had three young children who needed to be placed together. They insisted on a family with three spare bedrooms — a four-bedroom house. We were fortunate to have such a family available, but it's rare for couples without children to live in homes that large.

The irony: when these children aren't adopted because not enough families have multiple spare bedrooms, they remain in foster care — where they quite often have to share a bedroom anyway. Apparently it's acceptable for children to share bedrooms in foster placements, but not in adoptive homes.

Sibling separation

Because of the shortage of adopters who can take sibling groups, children are often separated. It's not uncommon for siblings to be split up because foster carers can't take a whole sibling group. Brothers and sisters who have already lost their birth families lose each other too.

What needs to change

The solutions aren't complicated.

1. Drop the rigid bedroom rule. Local authorities should follow the actual guidance — ensure children have enough space — rather than enforce a bedroom requirement that isn't in the regulations. This single change would immediately expand the pool of adopters available for sibling groups.

2. Make interagency fees financially viable. The voluntary sector is good at placing harder-to-place children, particularly sibling groups and older children. But agencies are closing because the fee structure doesn't cover costs. If local authorities are prepared to pay £300,000 a year for residential care, they can afford to properly fund the voluntary agencies that save them over £1 million per child.

3. Prioritise adopter recruitment. Local authorities have reduced the number of families they're approving for adoption at exactly the moment when the care population is growing. This is the wrong way round. Recruitment should be rising, not falling.

4. Focus on the children who are actually waiting. Most recruitment campaigns still show images of babies. This perpetuates the mismatch between what prospective adopters imagine and the reality of older children and sibling groups waiting for families.

A billion pounds and a thousand children

Every year, England fails to adopt around 1,000 children despite having decided adoption is in their best interest.

These children don't disappear. They remain in foster care, often separated from their siblings. Many eventually move to residential care costing £300,000 a year. They age out of the system at 18 without the lifelong family bonds that adoption provides.

And local authorities spend over £1 billion a year as a result — in 2022 prices. With rising care costs, the real figure in 2025 is considerably higher.

The system isn't working. The data is clear. The solutions are straightforward. The question is whether policymakers will act.

Because every year we delay, another 1,000 children miss their chance at a permanent family.