From what I know of the response to targets in other public services, this is possible. If your job or your funding depends on hitting the target, some people - esp. those at the top whose careers are on the line - will dream up creative ways of getting there. And that can and has involved putting lives at risk in order to do so, to my certain knowledge.
Thing is, it's hard to increase adoption rates, because most of the kids in care who aren't adopted aren't suitable for adoption. They are 'hard to place' for a variety of reasons. So if you want social services to increase adoptions, they are going to have to find more 'adoptable' children.
While many social workers are well-intentioned and try very hard to make a difference in the face of a system that often seems designed to undermine them - partly to do with endemic staff shortages in some areas - there are others who are not so good. Who make snobbish value judgements about parents, for instance. Who are patronising and define the interests of the child in a way that suits their agenda.
And the family courts are appalling in their secrecy and their hushing up of miscarriages of justice. Look at the invention of Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy and the attitude to expert evidence from people who have never even met the family concerned and who made sweeping, inaccurate statements outside their own area of expertise (Roy Meadows, for instance).
The suggestion by the person quoted in the Beeb article that there's no problem because parents whose children have been adopted don't make official complaints is laughable. There is absolutely no point in making a complaint once you've lost your children - adoption is irreversible as far as the birth parents are concerned. And if you've been browbeaten by officials to the point where you've lost your children, you aren't going to have any faith in the system and you aren't going to make a formal complaint.