David Batty

I feel very strongly that social workers don't really have a role to play here because of the historic role that social work played in forced adoption.

And I think my birth mother, I think a lot of birth mothers find it very traumatizing

to have to deal with social workers when they've had such a negative experience of dealing with social workers in the past.

I attend a peer support group for adoptees.

I make you realise that actually your experiences and your thoughts and feelings about adoption and reunion are not unusual.

So I think there could be more funding to help those groups.

The reason why we've got a crisis in adoptive families is also because the funding for birth families, early intervention support, has been cut and cut and cut throughout austerity to the point where you've got where children are being taken from families now.

They're already in crisis and already suffering far more trauma than they should have done because the support wasn't there for them and their birth families much earlier in their lives.

So all of those things need to happen for an apology to be meaningful.

If it's just words, it won't mean anything.