asked the Secretary of State for Scotland how may one-parent families in Scotland there were in each of the past 10 years.

There are no annual figures available showing the number of one-parent families in Scotland. At the time of the 1981 census, there were 40,455 households in which only one adult (a person aged 16 or over) lived with one or more children aged under 16. Most of these would be one-parent families; however, the figure may account for only about one half of all one-parent families as some such families contain children aged 16 or over and others live in households containing other adults.