New Rules on Intermediary Services for Descendants of and Other Relatives with a Prescribed Relationship with an Adopted Person
The new rules make provision for intermediary services to facilitate contact between ‘persons with a prescribed relationship’ and the birth relatives of a person adopted before 30th December 2005 come into force on 10th November 2015. More information about the legislation and a link to the government's consultation response, can be found in the Department for Education press release.
Initially it was expected that the new rules would come into force on 31st October 2014, however this had to be delayed to ensure that all the necessary processes were in place regarding the disclosure of the birth name of an adopted person under the new regulations. Further details about this can be found in the news item on the Adoption Search Reunion website.
CoramBAAF Guides to Accessing Intermediary Services
CoramBAAF (previously BAAF) has prepared three separate guides explaining the rights of relatives with a prescribed relationship to an adopted adult to access intermediary services under these new provisions, so that they may be able to locate adoption records and birth relatives. The guides provide answers to some commonly asked questions about the recent changes in the law and explain:
- what descendants can do to access the service and information they need
- the adopted person’s rights in relation to these changes
- how local authorities, voluntary adoption agencies and adoption support agencies, can respond when they receive enquiries from adopted people, descendants and other relatives.
The three guides explaining the new rights to access intermediary services are available below:
Find out about the Descendants of Adopted Persons (DAP) campaign
The Descendants of Deceased Adopted Persons (DAP) Group has successfully campaigned to highlight the problems experienced by descendants who want to access birth information about deceased adopted relatives, and to bring about change in the law giving descendants the same rights as other birth relatives. The group was founded by Frances Lake in 2008 as a result of her own quest to access birth information about her father from the time of his death in 1999. The full story of the group and its campaign are told on the DAP Group website.