Find missing persons 'key police priority' for Shropshire police

Detective Chief Inspector Alison Davies of West Mercia Police said the force's priority was protecting people from crime and said that searching for missing people was a key part of that aim.

It comes after Sir Peter Fahy, of Greater Manchester Police, said other police work was being compromised by thousands of calls that would be better dealt with by social workers. He said it cost the force £30 million a year.

English, Scottish and Welsh police dealt with 306,000 missing people in 2012/13, according to the latest UK Missing Persons Bureau figures. Each missing person call costs an average of £1,325, said Portsmouth University researchers.

Many cases involve young people who repeatedly run away from care homes. Some go missing, and are then found and returned by police officers, hundreds of times.

DCI Davies said: "It is our priority to protect people from harm – locating missing people is a big part of achieving this. We do all we can to ensure that missing people, whom we have welfare concerns for, are located safe and well.

"The Shropshire area particularly has a large number of young people's care homes, requiring us to work in close partnership with social services, in both locating a missing person and establishing why they went missing.

"West Mercia Police has recently appointed two missing person co-ordinators to assist in the Shropshire, Herefordshire and Worcestershire area."

In his comments, Sir Peter referred to the workload placed on police as they tracked down missing people. He said: "Every single day, sergeants and inspectors have to make hard decisions about what they are going to do, and missing children will always be top of the priority list.

"That means there will be other calls that we can't attend to, where we try to deal with them on the phone and where, perhaps appointments get cancelled, where crimes are put off to be investigated on another day.

"When you have somebody who constantly goes missing, it is not really for me a police issue. It is really, absolutely, a social work issue."

He added: "There are other professionals who are really better trained to deal with this. And that is really part of the discussion we have to have with other agencies."

Andrew Christie from the Association of Directors of Children's Services said: "

While we do recognise the additional burdens facing the police service, they do share a legal safeguarding duty and in return it needs to be recognised that our members are facing similar pressures."