FOI 0632 - 2023/24 - Missing Children in Residential Care

Request:

Q1. I am currently undertaking a scoping review to find out the answer to the question: ‘Why do children in residential care go missing, and where do they go whilst missing?”

I write to request any information that you have on this topic, which may include internal reports or evaluations of the following:

- Innovative practices for dealing with missing children from residential care

- Strategies used to target resources to missing children from residential care

- Spatial behaviour of children who go missing from residential care (i.e., where they go whilst missing)

- Experiences and perceptions of partnership working with children's residential care homes and how this can be (or has been) improved

- Facilitators and barriers to identifying the reasons why children go missing from residential care 

- Prevention activities in relation to children who go missing from residential care

- The effectiveness of Return Home Interviews and The Philomena Protocol with children who go missing from residential care in identifying the reasons why they go missing, and where they go whilst missing

The findings will help to provide an evidence base that can be used to provide direction to further research, and I will be producing a report once I have finished the scoping review, which I would be happy to share with you. 

Response:

Extent of Searches to Locate Information

Following receipt of your request searches were conducted within North Yorkshire Police to locate relevant information. 

Decision

I am not obliged to provide you with a response to your request pursuant to Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the Act). Please note that when one part of your request falls under Section 12, we are not obliged to review the rest of the questions and the whole request is therefore exempt.

Section 12(1) applies to your request as the cost of complying with your request is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of identifying and retrieving any relevant information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.

Due to the nature of our recording systems the information requested, if held, is not in an easily retrievable format. Our information retrieval process generally relies on a computer ran report which captures any information recorded upon the surface of a record or within specified fields. Where relevant information is held deeper in the record, or outside of a specified field, a manual assessment is required to retrieve that information.

In order to retrieve the requested information, it would be necessary to ask relevant departments to search for any data held that related to the request.  As you may appreciate this manual process would take a considerable amount of time, thus exceeding the appropriate time/cost limit as stated within the Freedom of Information regulations.

Pursuant to Section 17(5) of the Freedom of Information Act this letter acts as a Refusal Notice.

Pursuant to Section 16 of the Act I am required to offer you advice and assistance with regarding to refining your request to within the ‘appropriate limit’ (time/cost limit). However, due to the information provided above I am unable to suggest how you may refine your request and still receive the information within the cost threshold.  If you wish to discuss this please do not hesitate to contact me.

Please note that systems used for recording information are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data.  It should be noted therefore that this force’s response to your questions should not be used for comparison purposes with any other responses you may receive.