I couldn’t really nail this in my “follow the money” pieces (part 2 here), but it is important. I was thinking that a starting point might be an FOI request to the Department for Education, and had in mind these questions
1. Has the UK Government had a policy, now, or within the last ten years, of making payments to Local Authorities for meeting targets set in relation to adoption?
2. Please provide the documents in relation to that policy that set out what those targets were, what the payments were and how claims were to be made
3. Please provide details of any payments made to individual Local Authorities as a result of those policies?
4. Is such a policy presently in existence.
{If we can look at the policy documents and payments made, we can then look at the adoption statistical returns to see whether it appears that Local Authorities were making decisions/efforts aimed at getting those bonuses}
Help welcomed on refining those questions – I know how easy it is for Central Government to dodge FOI requests.
Andrew P