Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the answer by Lord Nash on 7 November (HL Deb, cols 894–6), how many children have gone missing from care in each year since 2009.

Local authorities are responsible for collecting information about children in care who go missing. Due to inconsistencies in local data collection and reporting, the Department for Education strengthened its data collection in 2015 to use a new definition of missing and away from placement without authorisation. The Department also asked for data on all children who were missing from care, including those missing for less than a day. Figures for earlier years are not available on a consistent basis and are not considered reliable. Improved information on children missing from care in 2015 and 2016 is published in table G1 of the statistical first release: ‘Children looked after in England, year ending 31 March 2016’. A copy of the statistical first release is attached.

This tells us that there were 8,670 children who were missing from care at some point during the year ending 31 March 2016, and 4,430 who were away from their placement without authorisation. As this is a new collection, the published statistics are currently classed as ‘experimental statistics’ to reflect that the quality of the statistics is still being assessed. Local authorities reported significant improvements to the quality and completeness of the data reported in 2016 so figures for 2015 and 2016 are not comparable.

The Department only collects the date on which a child has gone missing or has returned, not the time period and duration of the incident. Local authorities will hold this detailed information. However, table G1 does show the duration of missing incidents.