This year Hilary Armstrong, the Minister for Social Exclusion, visited a big, bustling care home in the former East Germany in search of ideas for improving the lives and prospects of the 60,000 children in care in England and Wales. She found a system that spent less per child than Britain does but achieved radically better outcomes in terms of employment and educational attainment. She is now working on a White Paper that must confront the depressing current reality of a system that is taking a steadily increasing number of children into care despite abundant evidence that the State is a bad parent; and is doing so at escalating cost.

As we report today, the number of court hearings over whether children should be removed from their homes has risen by 14 per cent in the past five years, to 4,000 hearings annually, while the cost of those hearings has gone up by an astonishing 62 per cent. This is a charter for misery for the nation’s most vulnerable children, since three quarters of these hearings end with a child being taken into care, where his or her chances of leaving school with five good GCSEs are one fifth of the national average, and those of entering the prison system are fifty times the norm. The sharp increase in legal costs is also imposing an unsustainable burden on a legal aid system that is already under intense pressure to rein in its ballooning spending.

The courts and social services have created a vicious circle of waste — of both public funds and human potential. The £208 million currently spent each year on child care cases would seem a chronic misallocation of scarce resources, were it not for the critical importance of reaching the right decision for each child. And the stakes at these hearings would not be so high if the options available to the children, usually restricted to residential care homes and an underfunded network of foster carers, were not so bleak.

The long-term solution must be twofold: to remove the stigma that currently attaches to care homes through sustained investment in the morale and training of those who run them; and to lend serious support to the alternatives to institutionalised care. In practice this means paying foster carers adequately instead of taking their labour for granted, and encouraging domestic adoption by cutting the red tape that contributed to a 3 per cent drop in the number of children adopted in the UK last year alone.

But such a solution amounts to a cultural change that could take a generation to achieve. In the short term, swift action is imperative to curb delays, shoddy case preparation and excessive fees that are only harming children who already have the misfortune to be mired in legal wrangling over their fate. Most childcare cases take between 42 and 51 weeks to work their way through a family court system that is shrouded in excessive secrecy. For any child this is unacceptable. For a five-year-old in desperate need of stability, it is unconscionable. The fees charged by “experts” whose opinions can determine where and how a child is raised have risen by 35 per cent in just two years. The real expertise deployed here is in playing the market.

Any child taken into care has already been let down by its parents. Too many are then being failed by overstretched courts and underfunded social services. No reform can come too soon.