If somebody is missing and you are reading this before going to the police station, stop reading and go. There is no twenty-four hour rule. It is not a law, it is not a practice you are obliged to accept, and the belief that it exists costs families the hours that matter most. Everything below will still be here when you come back. This is the only guide on this site that says that, and the reason is structural rather than dramatic. Every other document we write about rewards preparation. This one rewards speed, and almost everything that would normally be gathered first can follow you to the counter or be sent afterwards. Something else worth knowing before you walk in, because it changes the conversation. You are not accusing anybody of anything. Everything else people take to a police station alleges an offence against somebody; this reports that a person is not where they should be. The argument families brace themselves for, after reading about how complaints get registered, is largely not the one they are in. What actually helps is small and only you have it. The most recent clear photograph — not the one the family likes best, the one that looks like them now — and an honest description: build, height, any mark, what they were wearing when last seen, anything distinctive about how they move. Say plainly what you are unsure of rather than guessing, because a wrong certainty sends people looking in the wrong hours. One harder thing, said gently. Where the person is an adult who may have chosen to go, the report is still right, because nobody yet knows which situation this is — but its purpose is establishing that somebody is safe, not compelling anybody to return. And one refusal we hold without exception: we do not trace people, assist in tracing people, or suggest any method of doing so. Somebody, somewhere, has left deliberately to get away from somebody, and we have no way to tell those requests apart. The search belongs to the police. Our work is the written report and the file around it.
What this guide covers
Begin with the thing that changes how the next hour feels, because families arrive braced for something that is usually not about to happen.
Almost everybody who walks into a police station in distress is there to say that somebody did something. A theft, an assault, a cheating, a threat. There is an act, there is a person behind it, and the person reporting is asking that it be treated as an offence.
None of that is what you are doing. There is no act, no accused, and nothing you are asking anybody to conclude about anybody.
And the difference matters because almost everything written about police stations is written about the other situation.
Families read about how information gets registered, about what to do when a station declines, about offences that are treated one way and offences treated another. All of that is real, useful and widely needed — and it is about complaints that name somebody.
Having read it, a frightened family arrives rehearsed for an argument about classification. They have prepared for a conversation they are mostly not going to have, and the preparation is making them more anxious rather than less.
What you are actually there to say is considerably simpler, and it can be put in a sentence.
This person should be here and is not, and we do not know where they are.
That is the whole of the information. It names a person who is missing rather than a person who has done something, and it asks that the fact be written down and treated as what it is.
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Which is why the hard-edged advice that circulates about police stations fits this situation badly.
Those arguments exist because somebody has to decide how an allegation is treated, and that decision has consequences for whoever has been named. Here there is nobody named and nothing to classify in that sense, so the pressure point everybody has read about is largely absent.
We say this to lower the temperature rather than to promise that nothing will go wrong. Where you are told to come back later, or that this is not the right station, or simply to wait — the answer is to ask, politely and in writing, that the information be recorded now. The wider question of what to do when information is not recorded is dealt with in our separate guidance, written for exactly that difficulty, and it is the right place to look if you meet it.
One further practical consequence of there being nobody accused. Because no individual is being named, there is rarely any reason for a family to withhold anything out of discretion, which is a habit people bring with them from other kinds of complaint. Say what you know about the day, about who the person was with, about where they were going. None of it is an accusation and holding it back to be fair to somebody only removes information from a search.
So the test that sorts almost everything on this subject, and it is worth holding in a week when nothing is easy to hold.
Am I alleging that somebody did something, or reporting that somebody is not here?
Most of the time the answer is the second, and it should stay the second even when a family is frightened.
In the first hours people reach for explanations — somebody must have taken them, somebody must be behind it. That reaching is entirely human and it is usually not based on anything. Putting a suspicion into a report changes what the report is, and it changes it on the strength of a fear rather than a fact.
Where there is a genuine reason to suspect an offence, that is a different matter and it should be said. Where there is not, say what you know and leave the rest alone.
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Because the two kinds of information travel differently once they are written down.
A report that somebody is missing is a report about a person’s safety. A report that somebody has been taken is an allegation against a person, even where nobody is named, and it brings with it everything that follows from an allegation.
Families frequently say more than they know in the first hour, out of fear rather than carelessness, and what gets written down is difficult to unwrite afterwards.
The useful effect of keeping the two apart is on the family rather than on the file.
A family that arrives to report an absence can be clear, factual and brief. A family that arrives to accuse somebody they have not identified is already in an argument, with themselves if nobody else, and it makes a difficult hour harder.
Say what you know. Say what you do not know. Leave the explaining to the people whose job it is, and keep the capacity you have for the days that follow rather than spending it at the counter on the first morning.
Stated plainly, so that nobody goes in unsure what they are there to request.
That the information be recorded in writing. That the person be treated as missing. That you be given something showing the report exists. Three things, none of which requires anybody to agree with you about anything.
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Now the single most damaging thing anybody believes about this subject, and the reason this page opens the way it does.
Ask almost any family in this country how long you have to wait before reporting somebody missing, and you will be told a day. It is one of the most widely held pieces of entirely false information in circulation.
It is quoted with complete confidence, usually by somebody trying to be helpful.
An uncle who says that is how it works. A neighbour who knows somebody who was turned away. A colleague who saw it in a film, which is where most of it comes from. Occasionally somebody at a counter who repeats it because they were told it too.
It is not a rule, it is not a procedure, and it is not something a family has to accept from anybody.
The belief also does something subtler and worse: it gives a frightened family permission to stop. People who would otherwise have acted spend the evening telling each other that nothing can be done until tomorrow, and the waiting feels responsible rather than passive. Several of the families we have sat with described that night afterwards as the part they could not forgive themselves for, which is why we would rather be blunt on a web page than tactful.
We will not quote provisions on this page, and we do not need to in order to say the useful thing plainly.
If a person is missing and you are worried, the time to report it is now. Not tomorrow, not after a day, and not after you have finished looking yourself.
Nobody is going to criticise a family for reporting early. If the person walks in that evening, a report existed for a few hours and cost nothing. The asymmetry is so one-sided that it is barely a decision.
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It is worth understanding why the belief is so durable, because the explanation makes it easier to argue against inside a family.
Part of it is fiction, repeated for decades. Part of it is a reasonable-sounding intuition: adults go off, people come home, and nobody wants to make a fuss over somebody who is at a friend’s house. And part of it is that somebody, somewhere, was once told to come back tomorrow, and the story travelled.
None of those is a rule. What they are is a plausible-sounding reason to lose a day, which is exactly what they achieve.
The cost is not abstract and it is worth being direct about it, without dramatising anything.
In the period immediately after somebody goes missing, there are things that can be looked at which become harder to look at later. People remember a day ago better than a week ago. A description of clothing is useful while it is still the clothing somebody is wearing.
A day spent waiting for a rule that does not exist is a day taken out of the middle of all of that, and it is taken out of the beginning, which is where it counts for most.
One thing worth saying to whoever in the family is arguing for waiting, because it is usually said out of pride rather than indifference. Reporting early is not an admission that something terrible has happened, and it does not put anything on anybody’s record. It is the equivalent of switching on a light before you are certain there is somebody in the room. Nobody will remember that a family reported too soon; the other kind of mistake is remembered for a long time.
Which is why we would rather this page be slightly blunt than perfectly balanced.
We do not know what has happened in your situation and nor does anybody else yet. It may be nothing at all. What we know is that the cost of reporting early is close to zero and the cost of reporting late can be anything, and a family weighing those two things in the first hour should not be weighing them for long.
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And this is the only guide on this site built that way, which is worth explaining because the difference is deliberate.
Everything else we write is read before an exercise begins, by somebody with time to prepare. The whole value of those pages is in what they tell you to sort out first.
Gather the documents. Check the particulars. Find out what the office wants. Ask the question before you build a plan on the answer. That is sound advice in almost every situation we write about, and we repeat it constantly.
It is sound because in those situations the deadline is somebody else’s and the delay is cheap. You can afford a week of preparation when nothing is moving.
Here the arithmetic is reversed, and so the advice has to be.
Nothing you could spend the morning assembling is worth the morning. There is no document the station needs before it can record information. Identification, photographs, details, anything at all can follow you, be sent afterwards, or be handed over by somebody else arriving later.
Go now with nothing rather than in two hours with everything.
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There is a secondary reason for going immediately that has nothing to do with the search, and it matters to families later. A report made on the first day is a report whose timeline is clean: the family became concerned, and they acted. A report made on the fourth day invites a question about the three days in between, from institutions and sometimes from relatives, and answering it is an unnecessary burden on people who were only doing what somebody told them.
And so an instruction we do not give anywhere else on this site.
If you have not been to the police station yet, close this and go. The rest of this page is about what helps, what to keep, how to follow up, and what to expect in the weeks afterwards — and every word of it will be just as useful this evening.
Nothing here is worth an hour of today, and a guide that let somebody spend an hour reading it in this particular situation would have done them harm rather than good.
Assuming you have been, or somebody in the family has, here is what is worth your attention next.
Two things do more work than everything else combined, and both of them are things only the people who know the person can supply. Neither requires any document, any office or any waiting.
A recent photograph, and an honest description of how the person looks now. That is the whole list, and families routinely under-estimate how much of the difference sits in those two items.
Recent matters more than anything else about it — more than quality, more than formality, more than whether anybody likes it.
An ordinary picture taken at a function last month is considerably more useful than a studio portrait from four years ago. Hair changes, weight changes, people grow beards and shave them, spectacles arrive. A photograph is being used so that somebody who has never met this person might recognise them.
The right photograph is the one that most resembles the person as they looked last week.
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Which runs against a real and understandable instinct, and we mention it because we have watched it happen.
Families reach for a photograph in which the person looks well, looks happy, looks like themselves at their best. It is a loving impulse and it is the wrong criterion. The most flattering picture is frequently the least recognisable one, because it was taken on an unusual day.
Choose the picture you would use to point somebody out in a crowd, not the one you would frame.
One practical note. It does not need to be printed, professional, or on any particular background.
A clear photograph on a phone is a photograph. If the family has several, take several — different angles help, and a picture showing height or build alongside somebody else can be useful in a way a face alone is not.
If the only recent images are of a group, that is still better than an old solo portrait. Nobody is judging the photograph; it is being used, not assessed.
And the second item is the one families consistently treat as unimportant and which is, in our experience, the thing most worth ten careful minutes.
A description of the person as they are now: how tall, how built, complexion, hair, anything about the face, spectacles, and anything at all that is distinctive.
No office holds this. No record contains it. It exists only in the heads of the people who see this person every day, which is why it is the one contribution that cannot be obtained from anywhere else.
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Clothing deserves its own mention because it is time-limited in a way nothing else is.
What somebody was wearing when last seen is useful immediately and becomes less so every day. It is also the detail families are least sure about, because nobody was paying attention at the time — which is entirely normal and nothing to apologise for.
Give what anybody genuinely remembers and say plainly where the family is unsure. An honest “we think dark trousers, nobody is certain about the shirt” is more useful than a confident guess, because a confident wrong detail sends people looking for the wrong thing in exactly the hours that matter.
A small suggestion about how to produce the description, since families find the blank page difficult in that state. Do not try to write a paragraph. Have one person ask the questions aloud — how tall, how heavy, what hair, what was he wearing on his feet — and have somebody else write the answers down as they come. Two people doing it conversationally produce something far better in ten minutes than one person staring at a sheet for an hour, and it is easier on everybody.
And then the particulars that do not change, which are worth listing even when they feel trivial.
A scar, a birthmark, a tattoo, a missing or distinctive tooth, a limp, an unusual way of walking or standing, a hearing difficulty, anything that would make somebody memorable to a stranger who saw them for thirty seconds.
Families leave these out because they feel too small or too personal to mention. They are precisely what makes a description usable, and they are the difference between a person who looks like thousands of people and a person who can be picked out.
If more than one person in the family remembers things differently, record both versions rather than settling on one. Two people who disagree about whether a jacket was blue or grey have between them given a more accurate picture than either would alone, and nobody looking at a description is troubled by an honest “blue or grey”. Families compress their accounts into a single agreed version because it feels tidier; tidiness is not what is wanted here.
Which is the reason we spend four sections on something that sounds obvious.
Almost everything else in this situation belongs to somebody else — the looking, the records, the decisions, the timing. A family in the first days has very little within its control and feels that acutely.
This is the part that is theirs. Writing down a good description and finding the right photograph is a real contribution rather than something to keep somebody busy, and it is worth doing carefully even by people who feel they can barely think.
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It is also worth collecting one or two practical facts alongside the description, where anybody knows them: whether the person had money or a card with them, whether anything was taken from the house, whether a bag is missing. Those are plain observations rather than deductions, and the family is the only source for them. Do not build a theory out of them; simply write down what is or is not there.
Now a harder part of this subject, handled as gently as we can manage while still being honest.
A proportion of the people reported missing in this country are adults who have decided to leave. Not taken, not lost, not in difficulty — gone, deliberately, for reasons of their own.
Families almost never consider this possibility in the first hours, and we are not suggesting anybody should assume it. It is raised here because what follows from it matters, and because nobody else will say it.
The starting point is simple and occasionally unwelcome.
An adult is entitled to go somewhere without telling anybody, to stop answering a telephone, and to be unreachable for a period. Doing so may be unkind, it may be out of character, and it may be frightening for everybody who loves them. It is not, by itself, something anybody can be compelled out of.
Being missing from a family is not the same as being missing in the sense that requires rescue.
Which families find very hard to hear, and we would rather they heard it from a page than from a counter.
Where it turns out that an adult left of their own accord and is safe, the situation stops being an emergency even though the family’s distress does not. That is a painful mismatch and nobody handles it well, including the people whose job it is.
Knowing in advance that this is a possible ending makes it less brutal if it arrives.
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And here is the part that matters most, because it is where some families talk themselves out of reporting at all.
Somebody says: he has probably just gone off, he has done it before, let us not make a fuss. Sometimes that is right. The difficulty is that nobody in the room can tell, and the cases that are not that look identical from the inside on the first day.
Nothing you can observe from home distinguishes the two.
Which settles the question, and it settles it in one direction.
Report it. If the person has chosen to go and is safe, a report existed and cost nothing. If they have not, the report is the only thing that was ever going to help. The decision is not between two outcomes; it is between knowing and not knowing, and only one of those can be arranged.
There is a version of this that families manage well, and it is worth describing because it gives people something to aim at. The message that gets through, where anything does, is usually the one that asks for nothing: we are not trying to make you come back, we only need to know you are all right. A family that has decided in advance to say that, rather than deciding it in the moment, says it better — and it costs nothing to have decided.
But the purpose has to be understood correctly, and this is where families sometimes expect something a report was never for.
What is being established is that a person is alive and unharmed. It is not a mechanism for bringing an adult home, for obliging them to speak to anybody, or for delivering them to a family that wants them back.
Where somebody is found and does not wish to resume contact, that is their decision and it stands. It is a devastating thing for a family to be told and it is the correct outcome, and setting it down here beats somebody meeting it cold at the close of a hard month.
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And the distinction between establishing safety and compelling a return is not a technicality. It is a protection, and it protects a person we are not talking to.
Somebody, somewhere, has left to get away from a household. Not many, but not none, and that person is relying on the difference between “is she safe” and “where is she” being taken seriously by everybody involved.
A system that treated every missing adult as somebody to be returned would be a system that handed some people back to the thing they ran from.
Which brings us to a refusal we hold absolutely, and which is worth explaining rather than merely stating.
We do not trace people. We do not assist anybody in tracing a person, we do not suggest methods, sources, services or approaches for doing so, and we will not take instructions framed that way however they are described. This applies to every request, from every client, in every circumstance.
And the refusal extends past the work itself to the information, which is the part people find excessive until it is explained.
We will not describe how somebody might be located, what could be checked, or what a determined person could do. Not in a conversation, not as general knowledge, not as an aside to a family we are sure about.
A method once given cannot be given only to the right person.
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Because the reason sits with somebody who will never read this page.
The overwhelming majority of people asking about a missing person are exactly what they appear to be: frightened families in the worst week of their lives, and we believe them. But a request arrives as words, and words from a frightened family and words from somebody looking for a person who left them are indistinguishable.
We cannot tell them apart. Nobody can, reliably, from the outside. So we decline for everybody, including the many who deserve better, because the alternative is being wrong once in a way that cannot be undone.
We put it in writing here so that nobody has to ask twice and nobody feels they were singled out.
It is not a judgement about any client. It is not something that can be waived for a sympathetic case, because every case is sympathetic as presented. And it is not a position we will be argued out of by urgency, by distress, or by an explanation of why this situation is different.
What we do instead is the thing that is genuinely ours: the written report, said accurately, and the file that holds it. The looking belongs to the people whose work it is, and a family is far better served by a report that is clear and properly recorded than by anybody at a documentation desk improvising.
Now the part of this that is squarely our subject, and which nobody in the first hours has any reason to care about.
In the middle of a frightening day, paperwork feels like an insult. We raise it anyway, because the families who come back to us months later with a difficulty almost always have the same difficulty, and it is the one that was created on the first afternoon.
Nothing exists in writing, and so nothing can be used.
The first and most important habit is also the easiest to let slip when somebody at a counter is being kind.
A sympathetic conversation, in which everything was understood and somebody wrote something down themselves, feels complete at the time. A week later it is a memory held by one family and one officer who has dealt with a great many things since.
Give the information in writing and keep a copy. Everything that can be followed up afterwards exists because of that one step.
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The second is to leave with proof that the report happened.
Some form of acknowledgement, and a number or reference by which it can be identified. It does not matter how modest the piece of paper is. What matters is that in six weeks you can say precisely which report you are asking about rather than describing a visit.
A family with a reference is making an enquiry. A family without one is explaining a situation from the beginning, every single time, to somebody who was not there.
And the third, which costs nothing and is forgotten by almost everybody.
Photograph whatever you hand over and whatever you are given, before you leave the building. Every page, including anything written on by hand. If the family has somebody steadier present, make that their job.
It takes a minute, and in that minute you have fixed the single commonest problem in this entire subject, which is a family six months later being certain of what they reported and unable to produce it.
A practical note on who should do this. The person closest to the missing individual is almost always the wrong choice, not through any fault but because they are the least able to concentrate on a photocopier. If there is a cousin, a neighbour or a colleague who is steady and slightly outside the immediate circle, give them the paperwork job explicitly. People in that position usually want to help and do not know how, and this is a real task rather than a made-up one.
Because this paperwork is not only for the search, and that is the part nobody anticipates.
Institutions ask. A bank asks why an account has not been operated. An employer asks. An insurer asks. A landlord, a school, a department, anybody with a record and a process — each of them, eventually, wants to be told formally what has happened rather than informally.
What they ask for is something in writing showing that the matter was reported, and the family either has it or begins a second exercise to obtain it.
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We will say this carefully, because it concerns a situation we hope does not arise and which some families nevertheless find themselves in.
Where a person remains missing for a long period, the practical difficulties a family faces become increasingly about records: accounts that cannot be operated, documents that cannot be renewed, decisions that cannot be taken because the person who would take them is not there.
What can be done in that situation, after what period, and through what route, is a question of law and not of documentation. It is one of the harder areas there is, it turns wholly on the particular family’s circumstances, and an advocate is where it sits — not with us and not with any web page. We will say so, we will say so early, and we will not improvise around it.
What we can do, and what genuinely helps, is unglamorous.
One place holding the report, the acknowledgement, every written enquiry, every reply, and a dated note of anything said in person. Built as things happen rather than assembled later, when nobody can remember the order of events in a period they would rather not revisit.
Keeping that in one organised place is the least dramatic contribution anybody makes to a situation like this. It is also the thing that makes every later conversation possible, including the ones with institutions who have no idea what the family has been dealing with.
One further thing that belongs in the file and that nobody thinks to record: a plain chronology. What time the person was last seen and by whom, when the family first became concerned, when each call was made, when the report was given. Written down as it happens it takes seconds a day. Reconstructed four months later it is nearly impossible, and institutions and advisers both ask for exactly this.
Which brings us to the weeks after the first one, and to the thing families most want to know: what can we actually do.
Not much, honestly, and that is the hardest part of it. But the small amount that is within reach is worth doing properly, because done badly it can make things worse rather than merely not better.
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The instrument is a short written enquiry, and it is almost the only one a family holds.
It identifies the report by its reference, asks politely what the position is, and is kept as a copy. It does not accuse, demand or complain. It is a record that somebody is still asking, and it is the plainest possible thing.
A file that has been asked about in writing every few weeks sits differently from one nobody has mentioned since the first morning, and the difference is not sentiment.
Even where a telephone call gets a quicker answer, which it sometimes does.
A call tells you something today and leaves nothing behind. Three months of calls is three months of nothing anybody can point at. Three months of short letters is a record, and if the family ever needs to show that it has been pursuing this diligently, the record is what shows it.
Make the call as well if it helps. Then write a line confirming what was said and keep the copy, which takes two minutes and converts a conversation into something that exists.
And a word about pace, offered with some hesitation because nobody has a right to tell a family in this position how to behave.
Frequency is not the same as effectiveness. A family calling several times a day in week one and then falling silent in week five is doing less, over time, than a family writing once a fortnight for six months without ever raising their voice.
The thing worth protecting is your capacity to keep going. This may be short and it may not be, and a family that burns itself out in the first ten days has nothing left for the months that sometimes follow.
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There is one more thing within a family’s control that is easy to overlook: keeping the person’s own circle reachable. Friends, colleagues, anybody who might hear something first. A short message to each of them asking that they tell the family directly if they hear anything, rather than acting on it themselves, is worth sending early — because well-meaning people who decide to handle something quietly are a recurring complication in these situations.
Now a question every family faces within hours and almost nobody thinks about for more than a moment.
Somebody will suggest putting the photograph out publicly — on a group, on a platform, anywhere that reaches people. The impulse is good, it comes from wanting to do something, and it is not a decision we are going to make for anybody.
We would only ask that it be a decision rather than a reflex, taken after two minutes of thought rather than in the first hour.
The two minutes are worth spending on two things that are genuinely in tension.
On one side: more people looking is more people looking, and families have found somebody that way. On the other: anything published reaches everybody, not only the people you meant. It cannot be withdrawn once it has moved. It tells a great many people something private about a person who did not choose to have it told. And if the person is alive and simply needed distance, they will return to a situation in which it is public.
There is also the particular case this page has already raised. Where somebody has left to get away from a person, a photograph and a location circulating publicly reaches that person too, and reaches them as fast as it reaches anybody else.
So our position, stated so that nobody is waiting on us for it.
We do not advise families on whether to publish, where to publish, or what to say if they do. It is a judgement about a particular person, a particular family and a particular risk, and we are not in a position to weigh any of those. What we will do is make sure the considerations on both sides have been named before the decision is taken rather than afterwards.
Gathered in one place, the beliefs that cost families the most.
| Widely believed | What is actually so |
|---|---|
| You must wait a day before reporting | There is no waiting period at all |
| You need documents before you can go | Nothing has to be gathered first; it can all follow |
| Reporting is accusing somebody | It reports an absence and names no wrongdoer |
| An old flattering photograph will do | The most recent likeness is the one that is useful |
| A conversation at the counter is enough | Only what is in writing can be followed up |
| Reporting will bring an adult home | It establishes safety; it compels nobody to return |
A last point on the assumptions, since this table is not an accusation of carelessness. Every belief in it is held by sensible people, several of them are held by people who work in offices and deal with paperwork daily, and most of them are held because somebody trusted passed them on. The only unusual thing about this subject is that the cost of being wrong lands in the first few hours rather than at the end.
Three situations, and what each of them actually needs is different.
| When they reach us | What is genuinely useful |
|---|---|
| In the first hours, frightened | Being told to go now, and helped to write it accurately |
| A few weeks in, nothing in writing | Getting something on record and starting written enquiries |
| Much later, needing it for something else | Assembling whatever exists into a file an institution will accept |
The second of those is the commonest and the most avoidable. A family that was treated kindly at the counter and left with nothing is in the same position, administratively, as a family that never went, and they rarely discover it until they need to prove something.
Set out in full, including the boundary, which on this work matters more than usual.
Beyond that boundary: the search itself, any form of tracing, representation in any matter, anything alleging an offence against a named person, and the legal questions that arise when a long period has passed. The first two we decline entirely. The rest belong with an advocate and you will be told so at the first conversation.
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One addition about the third situation, because it arrives in a particular tone. A family coming to us two years later, needing something in writing for a bank or an office, is usually apologetic — as though having nothing on record were a failure on their part. It is not. Almost nobody keeps paperwork in the week this happens, and the right response is to establish what does exist and work from there rather than to spend any time on regret.
Given a heading of its own on purpose, since this is the request that comes most often and wearing the most sympathetic face.
We will not help anybody find a person. Not by tracing, not by suggesting, not by naming what could be looked at, and not by agreeing that somebody else might be able to.
If that is what you need, we are the wrong people and hearing that in the first minute beats vague helpfulness from us. The search belongs to the police. What we are for is making sure that what they have in front of them is accurate, complete and on record.
We should be plain about our own limits on timing too, since this is a situation in which people reasonably want somebody available. We are a documentation service with ordinary working hours and we are not an emergency line, and nobody should be waiting on us at two in the morning. That is precisely why the opening instruction on this page is to go rather than to write to us: the thing that cannot wait does not involve us at all.
One person stays with the family from the first contact onwards, and on this work the reason is not efficiency.
Nobody in this situation should have to explain it twice. A family that has told a stranger what has happened should not have to tell a second stranger next week because somebody went on leave. Whatever else is difficult, that at least can be arranged.
It also means the written enquiries read as though one person has been following the matter, which they have, and that the file is in order whenever it is next needed.
Set down together at the end, because in this particular week nobody is going to remember a limit mentioned in passing.
We never say what the police will or will not do, or how long anything will take. We never express a view on what has happened or on what is likely to have happened. We do not trace anybody or assist in tracing anybody. We do not advise on publishing. And we do not act, appear or represent anybody in any matter.
Where what is needed is somebody to act rather than somebody to prepare documents — an application, a proceeding, anything where a family needs to be represented — that is an advocate’s work, and you will hear it from us rather than see us take it on. Court work is for your advocate, whose fee is engaged and paid by you directly; we do not quote, collect or share it.
Place Order — no advance, pay after work
Plainly, as everything on this site is priced.
Our fee for Missing Person Complaint is ₹1,200, and we work to Same day on it.
Two things belong with that figure and we would rather say both. Nothing is payable to anybody for giving information at a police station — if money is asked for at a counter for this, it is not a fee, and we mention it because a frightened family is in no position to argue about it. And our charge is for preparing the report and the file; it buys documentation and nothing else, and it does not buy anybody’s attention anywhere.
If you cannot deal with this today, go anyway and come to us afterwards. The report does not need us to exist, and we would far rather be the second step than the reason somebody waited.
A closing word, which is the same thing this page opened with because it is the only part that is urgent.
Go. There is no waiting period, nothing needs to be gathered first, and nobody will think less of a family for reporting early. Take the most recent photograph you have and an honest description of how the person looks now, say what you know and say clearly what you do not, and leave with something in writing.
Everything else — the file, the enquiries, the institutions, the paperwork that turns up months later — can be dealt with afterwards, by us or by anybody, and none of it is made harder by being done second. The only thing that cannot be recovered is the time.
If you have not reported it yet, do that now — there is no waiting period and nothing has to be collected first. When you are ready, we prepare the written report properly: what is known and what is not, an accurate description, and the photograph and particulars organised as one clear set. We draft the written follow-up enquiries that keep a record of your asking, and we hold the whole file together — report, acknowledgement, enquiries, replies — so that the institutions who will eventually need to be told have something to work from. We do not trace people or help anybody trace them, we say nothing about what any authority will do, we do not advise on publishing anything, and we neither act nor appear in any matter.
What this guide deliberately leaves out, and the reason in each case
Absent here: any section, provision or decided case; any form name or reference; any helpline or office number; any period within which anything happens; any account of what the police do with a report; any method, source or approach by which a person might be located; and any charge besides ours. For a page about reporting somebody missing, that leaves out a great deal that a frightened family might have hoped to find.
Three reasons, and the last of them governs the whole page. Numbers and periods are out because a wrong helpline or an out-of-date figure would, on this subject, be worse than silence — a family acting on a number that no longer works loses the one thing this page exists to protect, which is time. What happens after a report is out because it is not ours to describe and a confident account would set expectations we cannot stand behind. But the governing one: nothing resembling a method of finding a person appears anywhere above, in any form, however general. A page cannot choose its readers. Most of the people reading this are families in the worst week of their lives; a few are not, and the difference is invisible from here. So the information simply does not exist on this page, for anybody.
Take all that away and what remains needs no authority behind it. That there is no waiting period and that believing otherwise costs the hours that matter. That nothing has to be gathered before going. That this report alleges nothing against anybody, which is why the argument people brace for is mostly not theirs. That the most recent clear photograph and an honest present description are the two contributions only a family can make. That an adult may have chosen to go, that nobody can tell from the outside which situation this is, and that the report is therefore still right — with safety as its purpose rather than a return. That a conversation leaves nothing behind and writing does. And that the acknowledgement kept on the first afternoon is what makes every later conversation possible.
If one sentence from this guide reached somebody in time, let it be the first one. There is no twenty-four hour rule. It has never been a rule, it is not a practice anybody is obliged to accept, and it is repeated with complete confidence by people who mean well. A family that hears it from an uncle, a neighbour or a film and waits a day has lost the beginning — and the beginning is the part of this that cannot be gone back for.
Where this stops being ours. To the police station, first and immediately, before anything on this page. To our separate guidance on registering information if you meet difficulty having a report recorded at all, which is written for exactly that problem. To an advocate where an offence is suspected against a named person, where a family needs to be represented rather than to have documents prepared, or where a long period has passed and the practical questions have become legal ones. And to somebody outside the family — a friend, a neighbour, anybody steadier — for the small jobs of the first day, because the people closest to this are the people least able to photograph a page or write down a description.
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