EXCLUSIVE: 550 kids in Edinburgh, the Lothians and Fife reported missing more than once last year

Forth News can exclusively reveal that up to 550 kids in Edinburgh, the Lothians and Fife have gone missing more than once over the last year.

The figures have been uncovered following an FOI (Freedom of Information) Request.

They showed that in the last 12 months, in Edinburgh 169 children have disappeared more than once. In Fife it was 124 children and in Police Scotland's Lothian and Scottish Borders Divison, the number was 254.

Gavin Smith from Police Scotland's Missing Perons Unit, said: "There are children that will only go missing once but we have children on our database who have gone missing dozens of times over the past year. It seems the peak age for those kids is 15 years old.

"When we do find the child we sit down with them and find out where they've been, what caused them to runaway in the first place and is there any concerns that need to be addressed either at home or children's home if they are being cared for.

"If we have some prior knowledge of a child that's gone missing before we'll obviously go back and look at what information we are holding. It could be that they head for the same area each time or more than one area. We then pull together all the information we have to get to a resolution as soon as possible.

"Since April of last year we've been running a missing persons database where we can look at all missing people across Scotland. From that we can see two thirds of all those we investigate will be children and a large number of them will be from a children's home."