EARLIER this month it was LGBTQ+ Adoption and Fostering Week. Across England and Wales, local councils, adoption agencies and government departments marked it with warm words and striking statistics. In Wales, LGBTQ+ fostering households have risen by 30 per cent in a year, according to figures released by Foster Wales during the campaign. At Adoption Matters in England, 40 per cent of approved adopters in 2025 identified as LGBTQ+, up from around 30 per cent the previous year. Ministers celebrated. The sector applauded. Hardly anyone asked the question that should have been front and centre throughout: what does the evidence say is best for the child?
The broader trajectory makes the question more urgent, not less. In 2013, roughly 1 in 31 adoptions in England went to same-sex couples. By 2023, that figure had risen to 1 in 5, a near-sevenfold increase in a decade – a figure Adoption England’s own strategy document now confirms. That shift may reflect a range of factors, including who applies to adopt. But it also reflects something else: a deliberate policy effort by adoption authorities to recruit and prioritise LGBTQ+ adopters as part of their strategy for expanding the pool of adoptive families.
Adoption England’s strategy for 2024 to 2027 sets an explicit goal of increasing the number of LGBTQ+ approved adopters – the strategy’s own words, listed as Goal 4 under its diversity ambition. To support this, every Regional Adoption Agency in England is asked to consider baseline standards for LGBTQ+ adoption produced not by a child welfare research body, not by a university, not by a government department, but by New Family Social – an advocacy organisation whose explicit mission is to promote LGBTQ+ adoption and fostering. The fox is not just in the henhouse. The fox wrote the henhouse rules.
The Catholic adoption agencies paid the first price. Eleven were operating in England and Wales in 2007. Following the Equality Act (Sexual Orientation) Regulations 2007, every one of them either closed its adoption services or severed its Catholic identity to comply with the law. Agencies that had placed thousands of children with loving families over 150 years of Catholic social work were forced to choose between their mission and their convictions. Most could not sustain both. The people most committed to finding permanent homes for children in need were driven out of adoption precisely because of the values that had motivated them to serve in the first place.
A separate but related pressure operates in the fostering sector, built not on explicit targets but on the equalities framework and its enforcement. Last month the government published its Renewing Fostering plan, backed by £88million and a pledge to find 10,000 new fostering households by 2029. The need is real and urgent. According to the Department for Education, more than 80,000 children are looked after in England alone, with around 3,000 waiting for adoption and an average wait of 27 months from decision to placement. Every one of those children deserves a loving, stable home. That is precisely why the evidence about what constitutes a loving, stable home matters so much.
But the Education Hub blog accompanying the plan contained a signal that should have triggered a national conversation. Too many people, ministers said, are being put off fostering because of ‘outdated assumptions about family structures’. You do not need to own your home. You do not need to work part-time. And you do not need to be married. Marriage is placed alongside home ownership and working hours as an antiquated barrier to be cleared away. I want to be precise here, because precision matters. Marriage has never been a statutory requirement for fostering. The government is not removing a legal requirement. It is doing something more significant: it is signalling to practitioners, to panels, to the public, that marriage is no longer a relevant consideration when assessing the suitability of a home for a vulnerable child. The state is not being neutral. It is taking a position against the weight of evidence about what children need.
The evidence is not neutral on marriage. The Office for National Statistics found that 6 per cent of children aged five to ten with married parents had a mental health disorder compared with 12 per cent of children with cohabiting parents – double the rate, a gap that persists across different family circumstances. The Marriage Foundation, using the Understanding Society longitudinal survey, found that cohabiting parents are 3.4 times more likely to split up than married parents – a gap that persists across every income quintile and after controlling for age, education, ethnicity and relationship happiness. The Centre for Social Justice found that by age five, 53 per cent of children of cohabiting parents had experienced parental separation, against 15 per cent of children with married parents, and that family structure has a greater impact on children’s outcomes than maternal education or poverty.
Children certainly need love. No serious person disputes that. But public policy cannot be built on intentions alone. The question for policymakers is not whether many different kinds of households can love a child – of course they can. The question is which family structures, on average and across populations, most consistently provide the stability and long-term outcomes that vulnerable children need. That is the question the evidence addresses. And it is the question that policymakers increasingly prefer not to ask.
The consequences for those who take the evidence seriously have been visible for over a decade. Eunice and Owen Johns were Pentecostalist Christians who had fostered 15 children between 1992 and 1995. In 2007 they applied to Derby City Council to foster again. In 2011, the High Court found that their views on sexual ethics rendered their fostering application legally problematic, ruling that equalities obligations in the fostering context take precedence over religious conviction. They were never approved. Cornerstone, England’s only evangelical Christian fostering agency, was downgraded by Ofsted in 2019 for recruiting only heterosexual married Christians as carers. The Court of Appeal upheld that decision in September 2021, and the Supreme Court refused permission to appeal in 2022. Cornerstone now operates under a policy it did not choose and does not believe in. These are not isolated grievances. They are the institutional enforcement of a direction of travel now embedded in both the fostering and adoption systems.
The same wilful blindness runs through the research cited to justify that direction. In 2012, researcher Loren Marks of Louisiana State University reviewed the 59 studies cited by the American Psychological Association in its official brief claiming no differences in outcomes for children of same-sex parents. He found that 77 per cent used small, non-random convenience samples; that 26 of the 59 had no heterosexual comparison group at all, and that where comparison groups existed, single mothers were frequently used as the benchmark rather than married two-parent families. In the same journal issue, sociologist Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas published the first large-sample, population-based study comparing outcomes for children raised by parents in same-sex relationships against those raised by continuously married biological parents. He found significant differences across 40 of 80 outcome measures. The professional backlash was ferocious. The University of Texas exonerated Regnerus, finding no evidence of wrongdoing, and subsequently promoted him to full professor. In 2025, Cornell sociologists Cristobal Young and Erin Cumberworth published a textbook on multiverse analysis through Cambridge University Press. They applied their method to the Regnerus dataset, running over two million alternative statistical models. They had entered the exercise expecting to disprove him. Every model confirmed his central finding: children fared better with intact biological parents. Young and Cumberworth were not advocates. They were methodologists who described their own surprise at the result in print. That is what makes their conclusion significant.
The government is searching for 10,000 households willing to open their homes to the most vulnerable children in England. A survey by First4Adoption, the government-backed national adoption information service, found that 55 per cent of people certain or very likely to adopt described themselves as actively practising a religious faith. American research by the Institute for Family Studies finds that Christians are nearly twice as likely to adopt and more than three times more likely to foster compared with those with no religious faith. The communities most motivated and most likely to step forward for vulnerable children are precisely those whose convictions now bring them into conflict with an assessment framework designed not by child welfare researchers but by a campaign group.
The government has spent a decade building a system that screens out those most likely to care for vulnerable children. And it is the children – waiting, too often, far too long – who are paying the price.
