Under plans announced last month, councils will be forced to merge or outsource their adoption services into regional agencies unless they do it under their own steam within two years.
It is hoped the creation of "regional adoption agencies" will give councils a greater pool of approved adopters to match children with, meaning they can be found a home more quickly.
But social enterprise Adoption Link, which works on behalf of local authorities to match children with registered adopters, has warned that the opposite could be true.
Evidence submitted by Adoption Link to the Education and Adoption Bill Committee, which is meeting today, states that: "While an increase in the scale of adoption agencies may result in some children being matched more effectively, research indicates that children with complex needs may actually wait longer.
“These children are more likely to require a search beyond their own region for a suitable placement, and barriers to interagency matching, and a sense of ‘self-sufficiency’ in larger agencies, may together make the situation for these children worse.”
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