Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what guidance his Department has issued to (a) local authorities, (b) foster carers, (c) children’s homes and (d) semi-independent unregulated accommodation on the (i) reporting of and (ii) response to children going missing from care during the covid-19 lockdown.

Nothing is more important to this government than children’s safety and doing all we can through local authorities and their partners, to prevent children from going missing. Regrettably, sometimes children do go missing, and we must make sure they can return safely to their carers or families. Statutory safeguarding duties on local authorities are in place to underpin this, and they remain in place as strongly as ever during the COVID-19 lockdown.

The department’s statutory guidance to local authorities for the care and support of children who go missing – or who are at risk of going missing – makes the government’s position and expectations very clear. This statutory guidance reiterates that safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children is a key duty on local authorities and it actively promotes effective joint working between agencies and professionals to minimise the risk of children going missing. The statutory guidance applies to all children whether in care or living with their families. If children are in care settings, the safeguarding duties on local authorities apply regardless of the setting in which the child is placed. The statutory guidance is available at:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/children-who-run-away-or-go-missing-from-home-or-care.

The data on the number of children who have been reported missing from care since the introduction of the COVID-19 lockdown is not available in the form requested. The department is currently in the process of collecting looked after children data from local authorities for the reporting year ending 31 March 2020. Information on the number of children missing from care in 2019-20 will be published later this year. Local authorities will submit information on children who have been reported missing from care after 1 April 2020 in the 2020-2021 annual return.

The latest annual figures on children missing from care were published in ‘Additional tables: children looked after missing from their placement 2018 to 2019’ and in the underlying data of the statistical release, ‘Children Looked after in England including adoptions 2018-19’, which is available here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/children-looked-after-in-england-including-adoption-2018-to-2019.

The department does not collect datasets on children reported missing who are not in care, or ‘looked after’ by the local authority. Individual police forces hold information about current missing persons incidents. Annual missing persons statistics, including how many children are reported missing to the police are published by the National Crime Agency’s (NCA) Missing Person’s Unit. The NCA intends to publish missing persons data for 2017-18 and 2018-19 later this month (June), with publication of data for 2019-20 expected at the end of 2020. The Home Office is the department that is responsible for liaising with the NCA on collection and publication of these datasets. It is important to recognise that NCA datasets are not comparable with data for looked after children that the department collects and publishes annually.