Written question WQ99765

The Wales Safeguarding Procedures Project Board has recently consulted across sectors on the revised All Wales Practice Guide: Safeguarding Children who go Missing from Home or Care. The Guide will be finalised during the Summer and added to the Wales Safeguarding Procedures website once approved by the six Regional Safeguarding Boards in Wales.

The revised Guide emphasises the need for every child to be offered the opportunity to meet a trusted adult of their choosing after they have been reported as missing and returned. The child may choose to meet a foster carer, parent, police officer, social worker or if available in their area, a worker from a commissioned missing children service that is independent of other agencies. Across Wales, differently terminology is used to describe this meeting with a child – Return Home Interviews is one of those terms.

The most important issue is that all children are offered the opportunity to meet a trusted adult of their choosing, that the venue for this meeting is chosen by the child and that the reasons behind them going missing from home or care are explored by the trusted adult with the aim of preventing this from happening again.

The revised Guide includes a section that provides advice to all professionals about how they should undertake this meeting with the child. The previous version of the Guide did not include this. The new Guide also separates out the response to children who go missing from their homes from the response to children who are looked after who go missing from home or care as this may entail other processes such as notifying Care Inspectorate Wales.

Six months following the publication of the Guide, the Welsh Government will undertake engagement with professionals, parents, carers and children who have experienced an episode of going missing, to test how effectively the Guide has been implemented and provide much needed information for us to determine next steps.

Further work will take place in the interim to map the offer of provision for children who go missing from home or care across Wales and how this is funded and to bring together a core multi-agency data set relating to missing children, with the aim of better understanding the picture and the next steps that may be required.