Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her department is taking to, a) reduce the number of children that go missing, and b) find children who have gone missing, in Devon.

This Government remains firmly committed to working across government and with safeguarding partners, including the police and voluntary sector, to ensure a robust response to when people go missing anywhere across the country. This includes ensuring that their families receive the best possible protection and support.

I am reassured that the police, working with other safeguarding partners, are driving forward robust action to ensure best practice approaches are taken to prevent missing incidents, provide immediate response when children go missing, and address the underlying harms that lead to these situations.

This includes working in line with the Missing Persons Authorised Professional Practice (APP), issued by the College of Policing, which sets out best practice for all missing person investigations for police forces in England and Wales in order to prevent missing incidents as well as ensure that all safeguarding partners play a role in an investigation. Provisions being implemented from the Children Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026, including requiring all local safeguarding partners to establish multi-agency child protection teams, will be another crucial step towards a more joined-up approach to protecting all children from harm, including those who go missing across the UK. The new National Centre for VAWG and Public Protection will also improve the response to missing children by developing best practices and delivering training to officers across a range of vulnerabilities.

This work is aimed at driving improvements in the response to people going missing across all areas of the country, including Devon.