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.
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.
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 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.
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.