FOI reference: FOI-2026-3754
You asked
I wish to make an FOI request using as a basis this previous data release by yourselves.
Firstly, I was wondering if this data was yet available for year ending (YE) December 2025?
Secondly, are you able to provide a breakdown by visa of the "first arrival" or the last available visa of those individuals with a "missing last departure"?
We said
Thank you for your Freedom of Information request.
Data for the year ending December 2025
We do not currently hold information on missing last departures for the year ending December 2025 in a recorded form.
Although similar analysis was previously produced for 2022 to 2024, equivalent analysis for the year ending December 2025 has not been created.
Producing this information would require additional analytical work, including adapting and rerunning existing processing and quality assurance procedures. Furthermore, the year ending December 2025 remains within an incomplete travel observation window. This means that not all relevant travel events have yet been observed and processed, and any estimates produced at this stage would be provisional and potentially misleading.
This is why the analysis published in May 2026 covered the years 2022 to 2024, where completed travel observation windows provided a more robust basis for assessing missing last departures.
It may be possible for us to consider producing similar analysis for the year ending December 2025 once sufficient time has elapsed for the relevant travel events to be observed and processed. However, no analysis for the year ending December 2025 is currently held, and we cannot confirm whether such analysis will be produced in future.
The previously published analysis is available in our Missing last departures 2022 to 2024 freedom of information request .
Breakdown by visa
We also do not hold a breakdown, by visa, of the first arrival visa or the most recent visa held by individuals with a missing last departure.
To provide this information, we would need to develop new analytical methods and carry out additional processing to derive and link data that are not currently produced as part of our standard statistical outputs. The requested breakdown is therefore not held in a recorded form and could only be obtained through the creation of new information, rather than through the extraction of existing information already held by ONS.
I hope this helps to explain our position.