Originally published: 8 July 2024. Last updated: November 2025 with latest 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.
This isn’t just a human tragedy. It’s a financial disaster costing local authorities over £1 billion annually in avoidable care costs (and that’s in 2022 prices—the real cost today is significantly higher). To put that in perspective: adoption could save over £1 million per child 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 annually—a 45% drop.
Even more strikingly, the number of families approved to adopt has plummeted by 56% since 2015. In the year ending June 2015, 5,060 families were approved to adopt. By the year ending June 2025, that figure had fallen to just 2,250.
Rather than using adoption to address the growing care crisis, local authorities are abandoning it as a solution.
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 forward. 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 secure an adoption order that legally completes the adoption.
But here’s the problem: 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 per year who were supposed to be adopted but aren’t.
The Cost of Failure
Adoption represents exceptional value for money compared to other forms of permanence. A 2022 study commissioned by the Consortium for Voluntary Adoption Agencies found that each successful adoption saves local authorities approximately £1,073,022 compared to alternative care arrangements.
This saving comes from the simple fact that adoptive parents don’t receive ongoing allowances from local authorities. Once the adoption order is finalised, only a small proportion of families require occasional support.
In contrast, children in foster care generate ongoing costs: weekly allowances to foster families, plus fees to private fostering agencies that can reach tens of thousands of pounds per child per year. When children reach around 10 years old and foster placements become difficult to find, they often move to residential care, which costs approximately £300,000 per child per year.
With approximately 1,000 children not being adopted annually despite best interest decisions, local authorities across England are incurring unnecessary costs of over £1 billion each year.
That figure is based on 2022 cost levels—with fostering fees and residential care costs having risen faster than inflation, the real cost in 2025 is significantly higher. And these figures are for England alone, excluding 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. In the 12 months to June 2015, 5,060 families were approved. By the 12 months to June 2025, only 2,250 families were approved. Both local authorities and voluntary adoption agencies have dramatically reduced recruitment. As the number of children in care rises, the pool of potential adopters shrinks.
The Voluntary Sector Is Disappearing
Voluntary adoption agencies—independent, not-for-profit organisations that recruit and train adopters—have been decimated. In 2015, there were around 25 voluntary agencies in England and Wales. By June 2025, only 11 remained.
These agencies play a crucial role because they work with children from local authorities across the entire country. At Jigsaw Adoption, for example, we’ve placed children from 50 different local authorities and regional adoption agencies. In contrast, families who adopt through a local authority typically only have access to children from that single authority.
But voluntary agencies are dependent on interagency fees—payments from local authorities when children are placed with families the agency has trained and approved. Despite these fees being increased over time, they often don’t cover the agencies’ operational costs. The bureaucratic, heavily regulated approval process is lengthy and expensive to administer.
To illustrate: the interagency fee for placing two children is approximately £63,000. This is a one-off payment that covers the lifetime cost of the adoption. Compare this to residential care, which costs £600,000 per year for two children. Yet even at £63,000, the fee structure isn’t financially viable for voluntary agencies, leading to closures and reducing placement options for harder-to-place children.
The Mismatch Between Adopters and Children
Most families looking to adopt have experienced infertility and naturally hope to adopt a baby. But 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. And 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
Here’s 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 families unless there is one spare bedroom per child. This isn’t a legal requirement—it’s just something social workers have decided to enforce.
The 2014 National Minimum Standards for Adoption (Standard 9.1) requires that children have “enough space,” but it doesn’t specify separate bedrooms. Yet local authorities rigidly apply their own bedroom rule.
To adopt two siblings, therefore, 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 Southeast of England, this is a massive barrier. At Jigsaw Adoption, we have to turn away around a third of the families who approach us because they only have one spare bedroom. These are people who want to adopt, who could provide loving homes, but 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 there aren’t enough families with multiple spare bedrooms, they remain in foster care—where they quite often have to share a bedroom anyway. It’s deemed 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 aren’t able to take on 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. Abandon the rigid bedroom policy. Local authorities should follow the actual guidance—ensure children have enough space—rather than enforce arbitrary bedroom requirements that aren’t in regulations. This single change would immediately expand the pool of adopters available for sibling groups.
2. Make interagency fees financially viable. The voluntary adoption sector excels 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 per year for residential care, they can afford to properly fund voluntary agencies that save them over £1 million per child.
3. Prioritise adoption 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 backwards. Recruitment should be increasing, not declining.
4. Focus on the children who are actually waiting. Most recruitment campaigns still show images of babies, perpetuating the mismatch between adopter expectations 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 approximately 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 per year. They age out of the system at 18 without the lifelong family bonds that adoption provides.
And local authorities spend over £1 billion annually as a result—in 2022 prices. With rising care costs, the true 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.
For the full data analysis and detailed breakdown of the figures in this article, see our comprehensive report on adoption system failures.
Data in this article is current to Q2 2025. Analysis is based on Department for Education statistics on children looked after in England and adoption orders issued. Cost savings are calculated using 2022 study data; actual savings in 2025 will be higher due to increased care costs.
