Question to the Home Office:

To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the findings in the report by Every Child Protected Against Trafficking and Missing People Still in Harm's Way: An update report on trafficked and unaccompanied children going missing from care in the UK, published in December 2018, what plans they have to investigate the causes behind the rising number of child victims of trafficking going missing from care after referral to the National Referral Mechanism.

The updated report by Every Child Protected Against Trafficking and Missing People, Still in Harm's Way, does not show a rising proportion of child victims of trafficking going missing from care. The report recognises the improvements in the identification of child trafficking victims over the last two years.

The Government is committed to protecting all children who go missing and recognises the specific needs of trafficked children, which is why we have announced a range of actions to better protect child victims and keep them safe. The Government has committed to expanding Independent Child Trafficking Advocates to one third of all local authorities by April 2019. The Child Trafficking Protection Fund which, as well as providing victim support and recovery, aims to reduce vulnerability to exploitation by preventing trafficked children from going missing and potentially being retrafficked. In November 2017, the Department for Education published a Safeguarding Strategy for unaccompanied asylum seeking and refugee children. The Strategy commissioned a further 1,000 training places for carers and sup-port workers to equip them with the skills they need to identify when a child is at risk of going missing and of potentially being trafficked onwards. The Refugee Council are delivering this training and will have delivered 1,000 places by the end of March 2019.

The Home Office is also working with the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) through the Home Office National Law Enforcement Data Programme (NLEDP) to deliver a National Register of Missing Persons (NRMP). This will enable real time information about police reported miss-ing persons incidents to be accessed by police forces across England and Wales. Over time the NRMP will build a national picture of historic missing persons incidents. This will assist officers when they are looking for, or encounter a missing person, particularly if that missing person is outside their home force area. We are currently working towards the NRMP to be in use operationally in 2020/2021.