Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many child abduction warning notices were granted in each year since 2010.

Child Abduction Warning Notices are currently used by the police as a deterrent against those thought to be grooming children, where the child is under the age of 16 if living at home, or under the age of 18 if living in the care of a local authority. The notices are a useful tool for the police and complement the powers to protect the vulnerable from sexual predators that we introduced in the Serious Crime Act 2015, for example Sexual Risk Orders.

There is no statutory or other legislative provision dealing specifically with the issue of Child Abduction Warning Notices; the Notices are part of an administrative process. Breach of a Notice is not a criminal offence and as such the police do not regularly record the number of Child Abduction Warning Notices, therefore this information is not held centrally. Individual forces may though hold data on how many Abduction Notices have been issued in each year since 2010.