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The numbers of children who have been removed from their parents as a result of an Emergency Protection Order (EPO) being issued by the family courts, in response to applications from local authority social/children’ services, are shown in the following table. The table shows the number of children who started to be looked after following the making of EPOs during each of the years ending 31 March 1995 to 31 March 2005.
Emergency protection order Number 19954 1,500 19964 1,600 19974 1,500 19985 1,700 19995 1,700 20005 1,700 20015 1,200 20025 1,400 20035 1,300 20044 1,300 20054 1,400 1 Only the first occasion on which a child started to be looked after in the year has been counted. 2 Historical data may differ from older publications. This is mainly due to the implementation of amendments and corrections sent by some local authorities after the publication date of previous materials. 3 To maintain the confidentiality of each individual child, the data are rounded to the nearest 100 if they exceed 1,000 and to the nearest 10 otherwise. Numbers from 1 to 5 inclusive are suppressed and replaced by a hyphen (-). Zero (0) is shown only when the number submitted was zero. As a consequence of our rounding and suppression figures may not sum to the total. 4 Figures are taken from the SSDA903 return which before 1997-98 and since 2003-04 covered all looked after children. 5 Figures are derived from the SSDA903 one-third sample survey between 1997-98 and 2002-03.