NOBODY in the courtroom looks glad to be there. Not the social worker, nor the barristers, nor the judge, and certainly not the mother with learning difficulties who is about to have her baby taken from her. She was neglected by her own mother, an alcoholic, and raised partly by foster carers. “I had a horrid life,” she tells the court. Now she is struggling to look after her own baby. The official solicitor, who represents people who lack mental capacity, neither supports nor opposes the council’s case. The baby will be put up for adoption; the mother will have no further contact, save for a letter twice a year. “I wish you well,” says the judge. “I’m very sorry that’s the outcome.” The hearing lasts 50 minutes.

Since the English courts lost the power to sentence people to death in 1965, arguably the most invasive ruling judges can make is the removal of a child from his or her parents. For much of the 20th century, judges used this power often. But the number of cases fell sharply in the 1980s and early 1990s as policymakers began to argue that families should be kept together.

Now the pendulum has swung back. English councils are asking judges to make more care orders than at any time in the past three decades. In the last fiscal year they made 134% more such requests—mostly to place children with foster parents, and sometimes to adopt them—than they did ten years ago (see chart). More than 100,000 children were in the care of the state at some point last year, more than half of them because of abuse or neglect. Comparative data are sparse, but Britain appears to foster more children than most rich countries; it adopts far more domestically born children than the European average, though fewer than America. Are more children in need of protection than before? The child homicide rate, one grisly measure of welfare, has been falling. And the number of children indicated by councils as being at risk of physical or sexual abuse has dropped in most years since 1995. Yet the number listed as being at risk of neglect (the main reason why children are removed from their parents) or emotional abuse, has risen. Anthony Douglas, head of Cafcass, a government agency that represents children in care cases, thinks the rise in care orders is a “very good thing”, since it means more children are being removed from “deeply traumatic” situations. Some argue that deep spending cuts since 2010 have made it harder for the poorest families to cope. Whereas councils are required to provide emergency child-protection, they have no duty to teach parenting skills or to offer respite care or other services that could help to stop struggling parents from becoming neglectful ones. As their funding has been cut, many councils have pruned such programmes. About 1,800 centres for children and young people have closed since 2010, claims the Association of Directors of Children’s Services, a group of social workers. Some councils that have maintained spending have managed to buck the trend of rising care orders. In Leeds the number of care applications has fallen by 7% over the past decade, which the council attributes to the fact that it has continued to fill social-worker vacancies and keep children’s centres open.

Yet an alternative interpretation of the national rise is that it does not reflect growing need so much as greater risk-aversion among social workers. Failure to take vulnerable children into care has resulted in some highly publicised tragedies. The London borough of Haringey was blamed for failing to prevent the death in 2007 of Peter Connelly, a toddler known in court as “Baby P”, who suffered more than 50 injuries over an eight-month period. In 2008 Haringey’s director of children’s services, Sharon Shoesmith, was sacked (unfairly, a tribunal later found). The next year, care applications across England rose by 36%.

The government has responded to cases like Baby P’s by encouraging teachers and police officers to make more referrals to social services. Today nearly one in ten children in England is referred for assessment each year. There is a danger that a bogged-down system will make mistakes. The risk-prediction model councils use for such assessments was introduced in 1988. A study that year of 10,000 families suggested that, under the model, 97% of parents whom the system would have flagged as potential abusers did not go on to harm their children (meanwhile, the system failed to highlight the risk posed by 17% of parents who later did).

Inspections of the council departments responsible for making the decisions do not inspire much faith. Nearly two-thirds of social-services departments were given the lowest two ratings (out of four) in their most recent inspection by Ofsted, the regulator, according to an analysis by the Social Market Foundation, a think-tank. Those councils taking more children into care tended to score worse. Only six of the 20 councils with the biggest increases in care orders won a “good” or “outstanding” billing, compared with a dozen of the 20 councils with the greatest decreases.

Happier families

Some believe the system needs an overhaul. In most cases parents do not dispute that they have neglected their child. The role of the court, then, is to balance options: would the child be better off with their parents or in care? “You’re gazing through a crystal ball,” one social worker says. “To do that in an adversarial court is just ridiculous.”

A big flaw is that social workers must juggle two sometimes contradictory functions. They begin as a family’s helper but can morph into the chief witness against them. The adversarial system is also expensive, since the state pays for barristers for the council and the parents.

In Scotland cases are heard by a jury-like panel of volunteers. In Denmark the social worker submits a report to be evaluated by a panel of experts, politicians and a judge. Only the parent has legal representation and their child may be removed only if four of the five panellists agree. Yet barristers argue that such invasive cases require skilled legal experts on all sides.

More pragmatic reformers champion the broader take-up of two innovative schemes. One is Pause, which runs in 18 of 152 English councils and aims to prevent mothers who have already lost one child to social services having subsequent children taken away. Nearly a quarter of mothers in care cases have previously lost a child, and sometimes several (in one instance, eight children were taken in turn from the same mother). Women on the Pause scheme use long-acting contraceptives for 18 months, while receiving counselling and support to meet their housing or educational needs. The scheme’s advocates argue that this leaves them better able to care for any children they may later choose to have.

Because Pause was piloted only in 2013, it is still too early to tell whether it is effective in the long term. But an evaluation last year by the Department for Education found that it had prevented at least 21 pregnancies among its initial cohort of 125 women. That alone will save councils at least £1.2m ($1.7m) a year, it calculated.

A second initiative is family drug-and-alcohol courts, which 22 councils offer to addicted parents as an alternative to care cases. Parents see a judge fortnightly for six months for “therapeutic” rather than adversarial hearings. According to a report by Lancaster University in 2016, 37% of parents kept their children after going before such courts, compared with a quarter after conventional hearings.

At one drug-and-alcohol court, a mother arrives for her first hearing, cradling one nine-month-old twin in her arm as she pushes the other in a pram. Everyone sits in a semicircle. The judge tells the mother to picture herself at the school gate in five years’ time, on her children’s first day at school. “It’s not an unrealistic dream, is it?” he asks. “It is your right and we should be very careful before stopping a mother or father having that right. Work with us and make it happen.”