Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many people were classified as long-term missing in each year since 2010.

The Home Office provides funding to police forces through the Police Settlement, and the allocation of funding within forces is an operational matter for Chief Constables. For this reason, it is not possible to disaggregate funding which is spent specifically on missing people.

The Home Office also provides funding to Missing People, a charity which plays a unique safeguarding role with respect to vulnerable missing children and adults, including support for, and promotion of, live police missing persons investigations.

Annual missing persons statistics, going back to 2010 and including how many people were classified as long-term missing, are published by the National Crime Agency’s Missing Person’s Unit: http://missingpersons.police.uk

In the year to March 2022 there were a total of 4,521 long-term missing individuals outstanding in police forces in England and Wales. Long-term missing individuals are people reported missing prior to the current reporting year and who are still missing on the last day of the reporting year, e.g. reporting year 2021/22 includes all individuals reported missing prior to 1st April 2021 and who are still missing on 31st March 2022.