Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to the response to the Urgent Question on 24 January 2023 on Unaccompanied Asylum-seeking Children, Official Report column 859, of the 200 children who remain missing, what information does her Department hold on the number of days each child has been missing; and if she will make it her policy to publish regular data on the number of (a) children missing from bridging hotels and (b) days those children have been missing.

There are currently no children missing from bridging hotels; bridging hotels are not utilised for asylum accommodation and do not house Unaccompanied asylum seeking children (UASC).

There are no plans to publicly publish data around missing UASC as this data is not held in a reportable format and it would require a manual search of records which would incur a disproportionate cost.