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One adopted person a week has been put in contact with their birth family since the Adoption Contact Register was started ten years ago.

More than 18,000 adoptees and 8,000 relatives have put their names onto the register hoping to be put in contact with each other, the Office for National Statistics said.

Since 1991, there have been 490 successful matches.

John Haskey, co-author of the ONS report, suggested the figures would be increased if more was spent on publicising the register.

He said the number of successful matches made since the register's inception was relatively small compared with the number of people on it.

"Self-evidently, the proportion of successful matches depends on both the adoptee and one of their relatives registering themselves; the fact is that, in the vast majority of cases, only one party does," he said.

But the figures are not an accurate picture of how many reunions are achieved because of the altenative means open to people in tracing relatives.

The number of people using the register showed there was a need for it but the lower numbers of relatives using it could demonstrate either a reluctance or definite wish on behalf of birth relatives not to contact the adoptee - or a lack of knowledge about how to go about it.

Mr Haskey called for the register to be advertised better and pointed to a successful poster advertising campaign two years ago in doctors' surgeries, libraries, social services departments, Citizens' Advice Bureaux and Register Offices.

The figures show that nearly 85 per cent of relatives hoping to get in touch with their children were women, three-quarters of them birth mothers.

About two thirds of adoptees on the register are women, mostly born in the 1960s.

Of the 490 successful matches, more than two-thirds were between birth mothers and their children.

The report says that allowing adoptees access to their birth certificates in 1975 proved far more popular than anticipated. About a third of women adoptees will at some stage in their lives apply for their birth certificate compared with one in five men. The younger the applicant, the more likely they are to be female.

It also suggested that figures held by the ONS on people applying for their birth records tallied with theories on trauma and denial in adoption.

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