Like all the previous legislation, the Childcare Bill makes sanctimonious claims to put children “at the heart” of policy. But it took a charity this week to point out that some children in care are being moved up to 20 times while they wait for adoption, and that some babies in care are being moved three or more times before they are a year old. Where’s the heart in that? The Government that shoots out press releases does not even keep the statistics that show that some of the most needy children are still waiting, waiting, waiting for someone just to take their hand and keep hold of it.

The State is a terrible parent. It takes children away from mothers and fathers but it cannot fulfil the basic human duty of providing them with a rock of strength through the transition. Almost 70 per cent of children come into care before they are a year old. But babies do not like speeddating. They need a voice to respond to, a face to smile at for more than a week before another alien face looms into view. How will the 700 babies who will be shunted between three or more different carers this year ever learn to trust, to love, to form their own relationships? That is a life sentence on the innocent, and one that will come back to haunt us all.

A whole generation has gone through care and now is sending much of its offspring back there again. The outcomes are well known. Children left in care are 50 times more likely to end up in prison than their peers. Sixty-three per cent leave school with no qualifications and a quarter of girls leaving care at 16 have already fallen pregnant. So why does every new initiative just restir the alphabet soup of agencies that have failed?

One agency worker told me that “local authorities find it difficult to think about things from the child’s point of view”. The excuses are legion. It is difficult to plan for children who arrive in the middle of the night, when the mother has fallen into a drug-induced coma or the father into prison. The first foster carer who can take them may have only a few weeks to spare, may be unwilling to take siblings together, or unable to cope with their particular disability.

But almost three-quarters of these children are already known to social services. Budgets are always tight but authorities are moving children around to make marginal savings. If they have to place them at first outside the area, they will move them back again when a cheaper local carer becomes available. This penny-pinching may make sense to auditors, but it translates into huge costs for society.

There is a better way, but it requires a complete reversal of thinking. In 1998 a few wise souls at the Manchester Adoption Society (MAS) looked at work done by charities in America, and decided that it would be better for adults to take the risk of separation rather than the children. That simple, intelligent, humane thought is dubbed “concurrent planning”. Instead of shunting young children around while waiting to see whether they can go back to their birth parents, MAS places them immediately with the person who would like to adopt them. That person knows, however, that their first duty is to help to support the birth parents to take the child back. Instead of legions of link workers, field workers and contact officers, that one dependable friend takes the child to meetings with their parents. The child keeps in touch with both sides. Some parents end up requesting that their child is adopted by the person they have come to know. A few gain the strength to take them back. The children who have had such stable attachments seem to do far better than similar infants in traditional foster care.

The dilemma is horrendous for the volunteers. “If the child returned to the natural parents, that was a risk for us,” said one. “But while we might feel bereaved . . . hopefully we would have taken part in something positive for the child.”

You don't find such heroic thinking inside the State. Local authorities originally sniffed that there would never be carers willing to make such enormous sacrifices. There were. Then they moaned that carers would sabotage the process. They haven’t. Now, many say they cannot afford to refer children to agencies like the MAS, although it is not always the most expensive route. This may help to explain why there are only four such schemes in Britain.

There are people willing and able to make this enormous emotional investment. We should now rethink our squeamishness about paying them. One foster carer I spoke to could not afford to continue with an allowance of £50 a week. Yet this is a deeply demanding job: many of these children suffer abuse, foetal alcohol syndrome, Hepatitis C, mental difficulties.

It costs roughly £2,000 to £3,000 a week to keep a child in care. Adoption and fostering is an astonishingly cheap alternative. The costs of failing to provide permanent homes are enormous. Yet we do not even keep statistics on the number of moves or on how many children are never found a permanent home.

This week the British Association for Adoption and Fostering will put up posters that state “Being constantly moved around can break a child’s heart”. It should break all of our hearts that a charity has to spell out the obvious to a State flush with cash, a State that genuinely wants to break the link of birth with destiny, but that is wildly firing blanks in the wrong direction.

Times Recommends

• It's time to take on the gangsters of the sea
• Déjà vu: six steps that make up a great panic
• Biographies that cast long shadows