Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many children under 16 are recorded as missing in (a) Birmingham and (b) the west midlands.

The Home Office does not hold this data centrally. Individual police forces hold information about current missing persons incidents.

Annual missing people statistics, broken down to police force level, are published by the National Crime Agency’s UK Missing Person’s Unit (UKMPU) (Downloads - National Crime Agency). According to the most recent UKMPU data report, in 2022/23 there were 10,899 incidents of children under 18 reported missing to West Midlands Police, which related to 3,940 individual children.