Can an Adoption Ever Be Undone? What Re X and Y Means for Families and Family Lawyers

Can an adoption ever be undone? In In re X and Y (Children: Adoption Order: Setting Aside) [2026] UKSC 13, two sisters, their natural mother and their adoptive mother all supported ending an adoption that no longer matched their lives. The Supreme Court held, unanimously, that it could not be done: a validly made adoption order cannot be revoked on welfare grounds. Along the way it dismantled a long-held assumption among family lawyers — that the High Court retains a residual power to set an adoption aside in an exceptional case — and traced that assumption to a specific wrong turn in the case law.

Disclosure and note. This article is published by Search the Law, a commercial legal research platform; the analysis has been independently verified against the primary source. It concerns a sensitive family matter in which the individuals are anonymised by order of the court. It is commentary for general information only, is not legal advice, and must not be relied upon. Paragraph references link to the judgment on The National Archives; we follow the court's own terminology of “natural” parent [34].

What the case was about

X and Y are sisters. After a prolonged period in foster care they were placed with their adoptive mother (anonymised as AM) in 2012, when they were five and four years old, and an adoption order was made in AM's favour in May 2013. Throughout, they kept in touch with their natural mother (BM) — contact that AM both facilitated and supported [7].

In 2021, both girls left AM's home and returned to live with BM; X later moved to live with her natural father. The court was careful to record that this breakdown “was not a consequence of AM rejecting either X or Y” — AM's motivation throughout “has been to support them and give effect to their wishes and feelings” [8]. Care proceedings in 2023 concluded with child-arrangements orders reflecting the new living arrangements [9].

In April 2023, AM applied to the High Court to revoke the adoption orders, so that the law would recognise what had happened in life. The application was ultimately supported at first instance by both sisters — then aged 17 and 16, and found to be Gillick-competent — and by BM, although X's position was less clear-cut and had developed during the proceedings [36]. The first-instance judge, Lieven J (Re X and Y (Children: Revoking Adoption Orders) [2024] EWHC 1059 (Fam)), refused the application — but on a narrow basis: she accepted that there was a category of case in which a valid adoption order could in principle be revoked under the inherent jurisdiction, yet held that the jurisdiction could not be exercised solely because revocation would promote the child's welfare. She also found that, had the power existed, revocation would have been in Y's best interests, because Y had “consistently found... the legal fiction produced by the adoption order deeply distressing and as not reflective of reality or her own sense of self”; X's position she described as “less clear cut” [37].

By the time the case reached the Supreme Court, X and Y were adults with children of their own. That made the appeal, strictly, academic — under section 49(4) of the Adoption and Children Act 2002 an adoption application may only be made before the person turns 18 (with the order itself capable of being made up to the nineteenth birthday) [5]. The court nonetheless decided the appeal in the public interest, recognising that “there will be other cases like this one” [5] — itself a signal that the Justices regarded the underlying question as one of general importance that needed settling.

The human dimension — and why the sisters asked

This was not an abstract dispute about jurisdiction. AM's case, advanced on the sisters' behalf, was that in highly exceptional circumstances a child's welfare may require the court to use its inherent (parens patriae) jurisdiction to correct a “legal fiction” — the mismatch by which the woman actually raising, and now legally displaced from, her children is not recognised in law as their mother [3]–[4]. As the appellant put it, Y was “trapped in an identity that she has totally rejected” [47]. The argument had an obvious moral pull: if the whole point of adoption is the welfare of the child, why can welfare not also unwind it when the arrangement has wholly broken down?

The court did not brush any of this aside. Adopting words used in an earlier case, it acknowledged that “nobody could have other than the greatest sympathy” with the applicant [74]. Both sisters were separately and independently represented by their own King's Counsel, so that their voices were heard in the highest court even as it ruled against the outcome they sought.

What the Supreme Court decided

A five-Justice panel — Lord Reed, Lord Sales, Lord Stephens, Lady Simler and Lord Doherty — dismissed the appeal unanimously, upholding the Court of Appeal ([2025] EWCA Civ 2). The lead judgment was given jointly by Lord Stephens and Lady Simler.

The reasoning starts from the design of the Adoption and Children Act 2002. An adoption order extinguishes the natural parents' parental responsibility and transfers it to the adopters (section 46(2)) [21], and the adopted person is thereafter “to be treated in law as if born as the child of the adopters” (section 67) [23]. Parliament built a deliberate scheme of increasing permanence: placement orders and special guardianship can be varied or discharged, but adoption cannot [24]. As earlier authority put it, “once an adoption order is made, it is made for all time” [31].

Three reasons there is no inherent power to revoke

The heart of the appeal was whether, alongside that statutory scheme, the High Court retains an inherent power to set an adoption aside. It plainly has an inherent jurisdiction over children in many respects; the question was whether that jurisdiction has ever included a power to re-order legal parenthood. The court held it does not, for three distinct reasons.

First — this particular power never existed. The parens patriae jurisdiction is an ancient protective power, but it “has never... been concerned with the reordering of parental responsibility”, and there is “no precedent in history” for a court using it to strip a legal parent of their status and hand it to another. A power that never existed cannot have survived the modern statutes [64]. Transferring parenthood back to a natural parent is achievable “only by a further adoption order” [67].

Second — it is not the inherent jurisdiction's job to fill a gap Parliament left on purpose. The inherent jurisdiction protects children from harm where no adequate statutory mechanism exists. Here, the court held, AM's case reduced to needing protection “from Parliament's failure to provide a statutory means” of revoking the orders — and that is “not a proper basis” for the jurisdiction [68]. In any event, there are ample powers under the Children Act 1989 to protect an adopted child who is genuinely at risk [69].

Third — the statute has covered the ground. A residual prerogative power will be displaced where Parliament has legislated comprehensively, and the inherent jurisdiction “cannot be used to circumvent the legislation” [55]. The 2002 Act has covered the field, so revoking an order through the inherent jurisdiction would impermissibly cut across the statutory scheme [71]. The court also rejected the seductive logic that because there was a pressing welfare need, the jurisdiction must therefore exist: “it is rather the other way around” — you must find the jurisdiction first, and only then ask how it should be exercised [47].

The myth the court corrected

Perhaps the most valuable part of the judgment for practitioners is what it says about the state of the law before this appeal. Many family lawyers had proceeded on the “received wisdom” that the High Court did possess a narrow inherent power to set aside an adoption order in a truly exceptional case. The Supreme Court held that this belief rested on a misreading of the authorities.

The older cases so often cited — Re F, Re M, Re K and Webster — were in truth about the Court of Appeal's power to entertain an appeal out of time, not about any free-standing High Court power to revoke on welfare grounds [78]–[87]. The court traced the wrong turn principally to Bodey J's decision in Re W (Inherent Jurisdiction: Permission Application: Revocation and Adoption Order) [2013] EWHC 1957 (Fam), which misread those appellate authorities — in part by treating Wall LJ's observations in Webster as if they concerned a High Court inherent jurisdiction rather than the Court of Appeal's procedural powers — and was then treated as received wisdom, notably in In re O [2016] EWHC 2273 (Fam) [50]. Meanwhile the one Court of Appeal decision that had squarely addressed the inherent jurisdiction, In re B (Adoption: Jurisdiction to Set Aside) [1995] Fam 239, was “clear authority for the contrary proposition” — that setting an adoption aside would undermine the whole basis on which adoption orders are made, “namely that they are final and for life” [74]–[77]. The assumed safety net, in short, had never really existed.

How English law made adoption permanent

The judgment doubles as an authoritative short history of adoption in England and Wales — part of why it will be cited for years. Legal adoption was created by statute in 1926. The Tomlin Report, whose view Parliament adopted, concluded that “the notion of revocation is inconsistent with the notion of adoption” — a deliberate choice, maintained in every Act since [105]. The single narrow statutory exception — the “legitimation” route now in section 55 — was introduced in 1958 to address the misplaced stigma once attaching to a child born to unmarried parents, and the court noted that “no case has been cited to us” of it ever being used [117]. Later reviews held the line: the Hurst Report said an adoption order should be “final in all circumstances except” a successful appeal, a superseding order, or legitimation [120], and the 2000 White Paper described adoption as requiring “absolute severance of legal ties” with the birth family [122]. The result is a scheme whose central tenet is that adoption effects “a permanent transfer of parental status, regardless of subsequent events” [125].

So was there any other route?

Yes — and it is worth being precise, because a legal audience will want the full taxonomy. A validly made adoption order is “not immune from any challenge” [78]. It can be displaced in three ways, each narrow:

• The section 55 legitimation exception — the only direct statutory power to revoke an adoption order, but confined to the specific legitimation circumstances and, as noted, apparently never used [25].
• A successful appeal for an appealable error — even well out of time, where there is a genuine appealable error such as an order obtained by deception; but permission and an extension of time are discretionary, finality and the child's intervening welfare weigh heavily, and extensions “are not granted lightly” [78].
• A later adoption order — which automatically revokes the earlier one (section 46(5)) and is the only means of transferring parenthood back to a natural parent [26].

That last route is the one the court pointed to here. While X and Y remained eligible to be adopted, BM could in principle have sought a fresh adoption order — which, if the statutory requirements were satisfied and the court made the order, would have transferred legal parenthood back within the statute. As the court put it, “that power could have been used in this case” [128]. Lesser measures were in fact used along the way: the first-instance judge allowed both young women to change their surnames back to BM's [37].

One argument was notably not pressed. AM's human-rights case — that the Human Rights Act 1998 required a different result — was advanced at first instance but abandoned in the Court of Appeal [39], and the written Convention and UNCRC submissions in the Supreme Court were “abandoned in argument” [135]. The court addressed the points for completeness anyway, observing that its duty under section 6 of the 1998 Act “operates within the limits of the court's jurisdiction: it does not extend it” [133], and that it found it “impossible to imagine” a situation extreme enough to require revocation of a valid adoption order to comply with Convention obligations [134]. Nor, it held, is there “anything in the UNCRC that requires a validly made adoption order to be capable of revocation” [136].

The case against welfare-based revocation — and the case for a safety valve

Here the decision becomes genuinely two-sided, and reasonable people — including the specialist family organisations that intervened — take different views.

The case the court accepted is a strong one. Permanence is not an accident of drafting; it is what makes adoption work at all. Prospective adopters commit for life precisely because the order is irreversible, and the availability of adopters depends on that security [30]. A rule that welfare could later unwind an order — even in rare cases — would place a permanent question mark over every adoption and invite exactly the destabilising, retrospective litigation the statute was designed to prevent.

The case for a narrow safety valve is the human one this appeal put so sharply. When a placement has wholly broken down, the young person has returned to a natural parent, and experiences their adoptive status as a distressing fiction, the law's insistence on permanence can feel less like protection than like a cage. Commentators sympathetic to the sisters have called the outcome disappointing for those whose legal identity no longer matches their lives, and the identity-rights argument raised by an intervener is not frivolous. The court's answer, in effect, is that the remedy for hard cases lies in the tools Parliament did provide — re-adoption, Children Act orders, name changes — and, if those are thought inadequate, in asking Parliament to change the law, rather than asking the courts to invent a power the statute withholds.

Why it matters — the takeaways

• Welfare alone cannot undo a valid adoption. There is no free-standing inherent or parens patriae power to revoke a valid adoption order because revocation would better serve the adopted person's welfare. Any advice resting on a supposed “exceptional case” jurisdiction must now be reconsidered [64].
• The remaining mechanisms are tightly confined. A direct statutory power to revoke survives only in the highly specific legitimation circumstances of section 55. Otherwise an order may be displaced only by a successful appeal for an appealable error [78], or superseded by a further adoption order under section 46(5) [67].
• Timing can be decisive. A further adoption application must be made before the person turns 18 (section 49(4)). Where a placement has broken down and re-adoption is in contemplation, advice should be taken before the statutory route closes.
• Explain permanence at the outset. Adoption is designed to create a lifelong legal parent–child relationship. Placement breakdown, changed wishes, or a later mismatch between legal and lived identity do not, by themselves, create any power to revoke the order.

It is, as the court itself recognised, a hard outcome for those who feel that their legal status no longer matches their lives. But Re X and Y is likely to stand for a long time as the definitive statement of why English law treats adoption as final — and as a reminder to act while the law still offers a route through.

Crown copyright material reproduced by permission of The National Archives. The contents of the judgment can be used under the Open Justice – Licence. The case law available through this platform only partially represents the activities of the courts and tribunals of the United Kingdom. This article is commentary for general information only, is not legal advice, and should be checked against the judgment itself, available in full on The National Archives.