The government reached a record January surplus this week, trumpeting higher tax revenues. But buried in Ministry of Justice statistics is a number that shows exactly where some of that money is desperately needed: special guardianship orders have exploded by 8,991% in a single year.

In 2022, family courts issued just 12 special guardianship orders. By 2023, that figure had rocketed to 1,091. This isn't a rounding error or a data glitch. It's a system in crisis.

Special guardianship orders are the legal lifeline for children who can't live with their birth parents but don't need full adoption. Typically, they go to grandparents, aunts, uncles, or family friends who step in when parents can't cope due to addiction, mental health issues, or domestic violence.

The timeline tells the story of a perfect storm. For years, these orders trickled through family courts at manageable levels. Local authorities preferred cheaper options: keeping families together with support services, or placing children in foster care. But then came austerity.

Council budgets for early intervention were slashed. Sure Start centres closed. Mental health services were cut. Drug and alcohol support services disappeared. The safety nets that might have kept families together vanished, one budget cut at a time.

By 2020, the pandemic accelerated everything. Domestic violence calls soared. Mental health crises deepened. School closures meant teachers couldn't spot children at risk. When lockdowns ended, family courts faced a backlog of cases where children needed immediate protection.

Enter special guardianship orders: faster than adoption, more secure than foster care, but cheaper than keeping children in care long-term. What had been a rarely-used legal tool suddenly became the system's pressure valve.

The financial reality is stark. Each child in local authority care costs councils around £40,000 annually. A special guardianship order, with its one-off legal costs and ongoing allowances, costs roughly half that. When councils are choosing between bankruptcy and finding relatives to take children, the maths is brutal but clear.

But this explosion represents more than financial pragmatism. Behind every one of those 1,091 orders is a family that couldn't stay together. A grandmother taking on her daughter's children. An aunt becoming a legal parent to her nephew. Siblings separated from parents but kept together through the courts.

The government celebrates its budget surplus while the human cost of years of cuts plays out in family courtrooms across Britain. Those higher tax revenues that delivered January's record? They're arriving just as the bill for a decade of austerity comes due, one special guardianship order at a time.

(Source: Ministry of Justice, Family Court Statistics -- Family_Court_Tables__Jul-Sep_2024_ -- Table_3)