Tears were wiped away in the public gallery as Sir Keir Starmer rose in the House of Commons to deliver a formal apology on behalf of the British state for the forced adoptions that tore apart tens of thousands of families between 1949 and 1976.
The prime minister told the chamber that an estimated 185,000 babies had been taken from their mothers in England and Wales, with women pressured into giving up their children simply because they were unmarried. “Mothers, many young, vulnerable, and without support were coerced, bullied, or misled into feeling that they had no choice but to have their children taken away from them,” he said. “What a thing to do.”
“Keir Starmer apologises on behalf of British state for forced adoptions affecting 185,000 babies from 1949-1976.”
Starmer described the practices as “a stain on our history” and made clear the shame did not belong to the victims. “The shame is not yours. The shame was never yours. The shame is ours,” he told the Commons. He said the forced adoptions were not isolated incidents but were “embedded” across local authorities, religious organisations and parts of what is now the NHS – institutions that “operated with power over people’s lives, yet they did so without compassion, without consent, and without dignity or proper safeguards”.
The apology came after years of campaigning by mothers, adoptees and their wider families, alongside parliamentary reports. Earlier, campaigners met the prime minister in Downing Street. One of them, former Labour MP Ann Keen, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme she was looking forward to “being released from my shame” by the apology.
Conservative shadow minister Alex Burghart agreed with Starmer, describing the forced adoptions as “a stain on our history” and adding that former practices are “mercifully alien to us” today. He said “those beliefs have left a permanent mark on each and every one of those lives, on children separated from their mothers and on the mothers whose children were taken away.”
No compensation scheme has been put in place, but the government announced a £4 million support package over three years for better access to adoption records and improved family reunion services. Support groups for mothers and adopted adults will be established by the Department of Education.
The Movement for an Adoption Apology said the apology “had come too late for a significant number of people” but was “a positive step for the hundreds of thousands of mothers still living with loss, whose suffering has at last been acknowledged.” The Adult Adoptee Movement called it “a fundamental correction of the narrative on historic adoption practices.”
Yet the question of compensation remains unanswered. Campaigners and opposition parties are already pressing the government to go further, warning that without financial redress the apology will ring hollow for the mothers and children whose lives were irrevocably altered by the state’s actions.