A father in Manchester hasn't seen his daughter in eight months. His ex-partner moved counties, changed schools, blocked his calls. His only option? Apply to family court for a Child Arrangement Order. He's one of 31,876 parents who did exactly that in 2023.

The year before, just 26 people applied for these court orders to secure contact with their children. That's not a typo — twenty-six. By 2023, that number had exploded by 122,500% to nearly 32,000 cases (Source: Ministry of Justice, Family Court Statistics -- Family_Court_Tables__Jul-Sep_2024_ -- Table_3).

While Tories call for a rethink of Parliament's renovation costs, a different kind of financial pressure is mounting in Britain's family courts. Each Child Arrangement Order case costs taxpayers roughly £2,500 in court time, legal aid, and administrative processing. Do the maths: that's an additional £78 million hitting the Ministry of Justice budget in a single year.

This isn't about divorces getting messier or parents getting more vindictive. The data suggests something changed in how these cases are classified or processed between 2022 and 2023. Either the Ministry of Justice started counting differently, or a backlog of applications suddenly cleared the system, or both.

What's certain is that Britain's family courts are now processing more than 600 child contact applications every week. Each case represents a family in crisis, children caught between parents, and mounting legal costs that ultimately land on the public purse.

The human cost runs deeper than the financial one. Every application means a child whose living arrangements are disputed, a parent fighting for access, and families spending months navigating court systems instead of finding solutions. The average Child Arrangement Order case takes four months to resolve — that's 16 weeks of uncertainty for a seven-year-old waiting to know when they'll next see mum or dad.

These numbers dwarf other family court applications. Adoption orders, special guardianship orders, care proceedings — none of them saw anything close to this surge. Child contact cases alone now represent the single biggest category of family court work, consuming resources that could address other family crises.

The timing matters. As MPs debate whether taxpayers can afford a £4 billion Parliament renovation, the Ministry of Justice is quietly absorbing tens of millions in additional family court costs. Every Child Arrangement Order that reaches court represents a family the system failed to help earlier, cheaper, and better.