Family Courts Made 12,774 Prohibited Steps Orders in 2023. Or Maybe 5.
The Ministry of Justice's family court tables contain two figures for prohibited steps in 2023: one of 12,774 and one of 5. Only one of them describes what actually happens in England and Wales, and the gap between them is a lesson in reading official data properly.
83,658 Men Were in Prison Custody Last Year. That's One in Every 360.
The Ministry of Justice's prison deaths file contains a number that isn't about death at all: the count of men held in custody in 2024. It works out at roughly one in every 360 men and boys in England and Wales.
Who Picks the School? In 2023 a Judge Answered That 12,032 Times
Family courts in England and Wales made 12,032 Section 8 specific issue orders in 2023, the latest complete year in the Ministry of Justice tables. That is roughly 33 a day, and the official percentage change published alongside it makes no sense at all.
The Biggest Number in the Prison Deaths File Isn't a Death
The Ministry of Justice's deaths-in-custody series runs back to 1978. Its headline figure for 2024 is 87,256, and that number isn't a body count. It's the living population every safety statistic gets divided by, which makes it the quiet lever behind every claim that prisons are getting safer.
Forty-Five Deaths in Prison Last Year Still Have No Cause
The Ministry of Justice logs every death in prison custody, and for 45 of them in 2024 the cause is still recorded as unknown. A year earlier, only 10 sat in that category. Here's what that jump actually tells you.
The Spending Files Nobody Has Touched Since August 2013
Departments must publish everything they spend over £25,000. Eleven of sixteen spending datasets on data.gov.uk are behind, and the worst of them were last updated in the summer of 2013.
Violence Outnumbers Drug Offences Five to One in West Yorkshire
In the latest West Yorkshire street-level records, violent crime accounts for 42.4% of everything logged. Drugs offences? Just 15 out of 184. The gap between what gets talked about and what actually gets recorded is enormous.
The 10,960% Surge That Never Actually Happened
A Ministry of Justice family court table records 553 parental responsibility entries in 2023 and, in the same year, just 5. Run those through a spreadsheet and you get an eye-watering 10,960% jump. It's a number that means nothing, and that's exactly why it matters.
Twenty-One Times a Week, a Court Hands a Child to a Relative
Special guardianship orders are the quietest part of the care system: no adoption, no headlines, often a grandparent in their sixties starting again. The latest Ministry of Justice figures show 1,091 of them in a single year, and a published comparison that makes no sense at all.