Tag Archives: Adoption Act 1958

What is a Provisional Adoption Order?

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The Provisional Adoption Order was a legal loop-hole introduced into adoption legislation by the Conservative government led by Harold Macmillan.  Under British law only British citizens domiciled in Great Britain could adopt British children.  The Adoption Act 1958 did not change this but allowed for non-domiciled individuals to gain permission to legally remove a British child from Britain for the purpose of adoption under a different legal system.

Permission was necessary as a means of controlling the situation and was laid out in the Act

Section 52

(1) Except under the authority of an order under section fifty-three of this Act (Provisional Adoption Order), it shall not be lawful for any person to take or send an infant who is a British subject out of Great Britain to any place outside of the British Islands with a view to the adoption of the infant (whether in law or in fact) by any person not being a parent or guardian or relative of the infant; and any person who takes or sends an infant out of Great Britain to any place in contravention of this subsection, or makes or takes part in any arrangements for transferring the care and possession of an infant to any other person for that purpose, shall be liable on summary conviction to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or to a fine not exceeding one hundred pounds or both.

While the application process was similar to that of adoption, two things were different.  1) the length of time required for the observation of the family by social services was six months rather than three and 2) the adopters were required to provide documentary evidence that they were eligible to adopt in the country they proposed to adopt in.  Once the court was satisfied, a Provisional Adoption Order giving permission to remove the child from the UK was granted.

The name is confusing because it contains the word adoption which signifies to anyone hearing the word, permanence and security.  The word should have been transport, a Provisional Transport Order as all the order does is give permission to transport a child out of the UK anywhere, without any checks or safeguards, the very thing that the word adoption promised.  In 1976, the Provisional Adoption Order together with the Adoption Act 1958 was repealed.

How do I discover if I am Provisionally Adopted?

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To discover if you are affected by a Provisional Adoption Order issued in the UK is quite easy.  It is a two step process and requires that you have access to your UK Birth Certificate.

1) Your first step is to look at the long version of your birth certificate issued by the General Register Office.  There are two versions of your birth certificate, a long version (complete information) and a short version (contains your name, gender and place of birth).  It is only the long one that will give you the necessary information.  On a birth certificate for someone adopted, column (6) contains the the date of the adoption order and description of the court by which it was made.  My column (6) contains the words:

Provisional Adoption Order, Second October 1969, Sheffield County Court

If you find similar wording it means that you too are provisionally adopted.

2) Your next step after confirming that you are provisionally adopted is to look for further information of an adoption.  This would take the shape of an adoption form issued in the country that your adopting parents come from.  You should also have other identifying papers or a social security number issued by the same country as the adoption happened in.  So for example I would have been issued with a social security number from the USA if I had been legally adopted there.  If you cannot find any of these papers then you will need to ask your adopting parents for them, this can of course be tricky.  At this point if you have found these papers or your parents have given them to you, everything is fine and you will have been legally adopted.

If on the other hand you have not been able to locate these papers yourself and your adopting parents do not have them then you will need ask them for the details of your legal adoption.  Once you have the details you will need to approach the authorities and ask them to do a search for your adoption papers.  In my search I have found the authorities to be sympathetic and helpful in this.  If at this point your papers are discovered, read through them to verify that everything is correct and rest assured that you were legally adopted.

If you, like I did, discover at this point that there never was an adoption in any country, you have entered into a profoundly strange and difficult place.  The first thing you must do is seek legal help to sort this mess out.  I wish that I could give clear guidelines but currently there are none.  The second thing you are going to need is an adoption counsellor to help you realign your life as there are some major adjustments ahead.  I wish I could say that everything will be sorted and go back to normal, but unfortunately the fact that you were not legally adopted ensures that it cannot return to normal even if and when everything else is sorted.

How long does a Provisional Adoption Order last?

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In a recent telephone conversation with the General Records Office (GRO) I was told very clearly that the solution to my situation was to approach the authorities in the country that I was living in.  All that needed to happen was to convince the authorities to ‘formalise’ the Provisional Adoption Order (PAO) that had merely lain dormant since it had been issued.  This was the advice that the GRO expert had to give me and it seems to be very sensible and reasonable as well.

Having read that the PAO might in actual fact have a short legal lifespan I asked if this was actually true.  The answer was emphatic, once a PAO is given by the County Court they are active until they are formalised. This would of course be a fantastic option, but it is not quite true.

In my initial writing of this post in April 2014, I had read the article published in the ‘The Modern Law Review‘ Sept. 1959, Volume 22, Issue 5, on page 503.  In it the statement was made that As before the Act was passed, interim orders may be made for a maximum of two years, but now where the original interim order is for a lesser period, it may be extended to a maximum of two years in all.  I had read this to apply to the case of the PAO and in hindsight it is easy to see how you might link the word interim  and provisional, as they are very close in meaning.  In actual fact they are two very different and distinct types of processes and I made a honest mistake in confusing these two and I apologise for not double checking my facts.  The fact is that the PAO is not limited like interim adoptions to a two year period.

Does this mean that the GRO was correct?  While they were correct in saying that there was no legal restriction placed on the time frame inside of which a PAO could be enacted, there is another time frame for adoption in general.  The answer to the question ‘who can be adopted?’ is that to be eligible for adoption a child must be under the age of 18 years. A child who is married or has been married cannot be adopted.  In this framework as the last PAO was issued in the early 1970s, a child provisionally adopted would now be a minimum of 40 years old and so if they have not been formally adopted they would now be ineligible for adoption.

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I need to take a step back and answer some questions at the heart of my adoption.  I have been told that when I was adopted the process “was fairly simple and straight forward.  There is no doubt that many more regulations are in place now and hind sight is a great thing but at the time of [my] adoption, the whole process went smoothly.”

To answer this we need to look at a few facts. 1) a definition of what adoption is 2) what were the rules that were in place in the 1960’s to deal with adoption 3) is there any way that there could have been a misunderstanding in what a provisional adoption order was.

1) a definition of adoption

Adoption is a process whereby a person assumes the parenting for another and, in so doing, permanently transfers all rights and responsibilities, along with filiation, from the biological parent or parents. Unlike guardianship or other systems designed for the care of the young, adoption is intended to effect a permanent change in status and as such requires societal recognition, either through legal or religious sanction. Adoption – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Every culture has their own way of dealing with the issue of adoption.  Many answer the challenges of the permanent change in status through legal processes.  In recent times the Hague Adoption Convention has become an internationally recognised convention dealing with the issue of international adoption.  Whatever the name of the process or convention the underlining idea is the safeguarding and protection of the child that is to be adopted.  In this regard there is little that is ‘simple’ it is in fact incredibly complex, as it should be.

2) What rules were in place in the UK that governed adoption in the 1960s & early 1970s

While there were early regulations governing adoption in the UK, the first modern regulations were known as the Adoption Act 1958 and came into force on 1 April 1959.  This was the result of the report of the Hurst Committee, delivered in September 1954.  On the basis of the Committee’s findings new laws were put into place governing the consent of the natural parents, qualifications of adopters, adoption procedure and the procedure used in cases where the adoption is disputed.  In addition to the regulations put in place by the UK government, the government also accepted the European Convention for the Adoption of Children in 1968.  This placed further requirements on the process of adoption that all involved with adoption in the UK had to adhere to.

Some today will look back at this period as a simpler time in the development of adoption, the reality is very different.  The basis of much of today’s adoption law is based upon the developments following the Adoption Acts 1958.  The one thing that the Adoption Act 1958 cannot be accused of was being simple, it was a very complex piece of legislature that was attempting to ensure the safety of the child facing adoption.  It may not have been successful in all that it attempted to do, but in the development of adoption law it was a landmark.

3) Could there have been a misunderstanding of what a provisional adoption order was?

Given that:

1) this was the focus of a number of Commons debates and was discussed in the papers, this was not a piece of legislature that the public were unaware of.

2) there were only two options available, adoption order for those who were resident in the UK and provisional adoption order if you were not.  The requirements for gaining one of these were slightly different from the other.

3) the adoption agencies were concious of the change of legislation required of them for international adoption

4) the solicitors involved with preparing the paperwork for the County Court would have known the difference

5) the process for gaining a provisional adoption order took double the time than a regular adoption order, it is highly unlikely that someone at some point would not have mentioned the two options needed.

6) In my case I have letters from lawyers in the USA vouching for my ‘adopted parents’ and offering their services to complete the adoption in the USA.

Given all of these factors I think that it is a long stretch of the imagination to believe that someone either did not know or misunderstood what it was that they were getting when the applied for a provisional adoption order.