IN THE wake of the horrendous child-abuse scandal in care homes in Wales, Tony Blair pledges to revise the adoption laws so that more children are placed in loving family situations and fewer in institutions.

He is right to reverse the prevailing polarity - for we find 50,000 youngsters in care while adoptions have fallen from 20,000 a year in the 1960s to 6,000 now while thousands of childless couples are eager to adopt.

Yet if social workers are right to apply strict vetting procedures so that children do not end up in the care of couples who are abusers - a condition that manifestly did not apply in the cases of the hundreds abused for two decades in those hellish Welsh institutions where many were sent instead - it is time that stupid obstacles were removed from those who are fit and proper persons to adopt.

We have heard of instances of people being turned down because they smoked or because they were deemed to be racially mismatched and even because they were fat.

If Mr Blair is ripping up such politically-correct claptrap that seems endemic in the social workers' world and boosting the comeback of adoption, it will be an overdue blow for common sense.

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