Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate he has made of the proportion of looked-after children in children’s homes who have gone missing from children’s homes (a) in borough and (b) out of borough in each year since 2012.

The number and percentage of looked-after children in children’s homes who were reported missing by placement location since 2015 is shown in the attached table.

The latest figures on looked-after children who were missing are published in Table G1 of the statistical release ‘Children looked after in England including adoption: 2017 to 2018’ at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/children-looked-after-in-england-including-adoption-2017-to-2018.

All figures on the overall number of children who were looked after during the year and were missing, are still classified as experimental statistics. The figures were collected for the first time in 2015 and should be treated with caution. As these statistics are experimental, the figures are not comparable across years.