It is not often this column half agrees with our social workers, but when the Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, comes up with yet another government attempt to “fast-track” the speed with which children in “care” are adopted, and a Community Care poll shows that this is strongly opposed by 69 per cent of social workers, it is hard not to.

She is only doing this, they claim, because she wants to save money; and they believe that such relentless pressure to speed up adoptions is not in the children’s “best interests”. I have quoted before what was said last year to a conference by Maggie Mellon, deputy chairman of the British Association of Social Workers: “The policy imperative towards more and quicker forced adoption means we may well look back at this period with horror as we do now to the forcible removal of thousands of children to Australia in the Thirties, Forties and Fifties… that was done because it was felt it was the right thing. But now we think, how on earth could we possibly have done that?”

It is true that the record number of children now in care, 69,540 in England alone, is higher than at any time since the 1989 Children Act, while placements for adoption fell in 2015 by 24 per cent to 7,320. But the reason for this dramatic fall was two trenchant judgments in which our top family judge, Sir James Munby, excoriated local authorities for their failure in too many instances to make a proper case that adoption is in a child’s best interests. What, of course, ministers never admit is that, too often, there is no good reason for children to be taken from their families at all. Nor do they address the tragic fact that too many children then suffer far worse treatment in “care” than anything alleged against their parents as the excuse for removing them.