Here is a number worth sitting with. In 2023, the family courts in England and Wales made 31,876 Child Arrangement Orders dealing with contact: who a child sees, when, and for how long. (Source: Ministry of Justice, Family Court Statistics -- Family_Court_Tables__Jul-Sep_2024_ -- Table_3)

That works out at roughly 87 orders a day, every day, including weekends and bank holidays. Eighty-seven times a day, a judge decides a question that most families settle over a kitchen table.

Now the awkward bit. The same table, for the same year, also carries a value of 26. Compare 31,876 against 26 and you get a rise of 122,500%. That is the kind of figure that ends up in a headline, a press release, or an automated dashboard alert. It should never do any of those things.

Two numbers labelled with the same year cannot both be a full annual count of the same thing. The most likely reading, and I want to be clear this is my reading rather than something the table states, is that one figure covers a full year and the other covers a fragment: a single quarter, a partial series, or a category that was recorded differently. That is what the MoJ publication is: a quarterly file, updated as cases work through the system, with columns that mean different things depending on where you look.

Follow the timeline the data itself allows and you see how this happens. A quarterly release covering July to September 2024 is not a clean annual ledger. It is a running tally. Early entries get revised. Categories carry footnotes. A row that looks like a year-on-year comparison may be nothing of the sort. Anyone pulling a single cell out of that file and calling it a trend is making a claim the file does not support.

The strongest alternative reading of my own point is simple: the 26 may be perfectly correct and perfectly meaningful in its original context, and the fault lies entirely with the comparison, not the statistic. A count of 26 could be a specific order type, a specific court, or a period of weeks. Nothing in the table is wrong. What is wrong is the arithmetic someone does to it afterwards. And because this is the most recent published version of the file rather than live 2026 data, the picture may have shifted since.

This is where transparency actually bites. Departments publish enormous spreadsheets and treat publication as the end of the obligation. It is not. If a table can be misread as a 122,500% increase by anyone doing the obvious sum, the presentation has failed, even if every cell is accurate. Clear labelling of what each figure counts, and over what period, costs the Ministry of Justice nothing and saves everyone else from nonsense.

Strip the noise away and the real finding stands on its own without any percentage attached. Nearly 32,000 contact orders in a single year, from courts that are slow, expensive and stressful to reach. That number does not need a growth rate to matter. It needs someone to ask why so many families end up in front of a judge to answer a question about seeing their own children.

The 122,500% is a mirage. The 31,876 is the story.