He suggested considerations that directors of social services should make about the records that their local authorities should collect. Again, I want to revert to that subject shortly. When my hon. Friend the Member for Meriden set out the reasons for the Bill, she did us a service by recalling that we have an opportunity that generally occurs once in a generation in the history of adoption. That history goes well beyond the House's involvement, which began in the 1920s.
Adoption has an ancient and distinguished history.
The course of history would have been different if Moses had not been adopted by Pharaoh's daughter. However, transplanting an adoptee into a new family as a full member of it is a 20th-century phenomenon. In the past, adoption was different. Foundlings and orphans were taken in by relatives or others in ancient societies, but they were rarely considered full members of the adoptive families with equal rights in the way in which the Adoption of Children Act 1926 establishes for the first time in Anglo-Saxon legal history. In the past, considerations of lineage and inheritance worked against the inclusion of adoptees as full and equal members of a family.