While Tories call for a rethink of Parliament's renovation costs, a far more dramatic spending surge has been hiding in plain sight in Britain's family courts.

Enforcement orders — the legal hammer courts use when parents ignore custody arrangements or fail to pay child support — rocketed from just 1 case in 2023 to 5,109 cases by the end of the same year. That's not a typo. It's a 510,700% increase in twelve months.

This isn't about more parents misbehaving. This is about a system that suddenly started documenting what was always there. For years, family courts operated with minimal data collection on enforcement actions. Parents who didn't see their children, maintenance payments that never arrived, court orders that became worthless pieces of paper — it all happened, but nobody counted it properly.

The Ministry of Justice quietly changed how it records these cases in 2023. What emerges is a picture of a justice system that was flying blind. Every one of those 5,109 enforcement orders represents a family where the initial court decision failed. A parent denied access to their children. A single mother chasing maintenance payments that never came. Children caught in the middle of adults who ignored legal orders.

The financial implications are staggering. Each enforcement case requires court time, legal representation, and administrative processing. Conservative estimates put the cost per enforcement case at £1,500 when you factor in judge time, court staff, and legal aid. That means this newly-visible caseload is costing taxpayers around £7.6 million annually — money that wasn't budgeted because these cases weren't properly tracked.

But the human cost matters more. These aren't administrative statistics. They're families where the law failed the first time. A father who hasn't seen his daughter in months because her mother ignores the contact order. A mother working two jobs because her ex-husband stopped paying maintenance, despite a court order requiring it. Children who suffer because adults treat court decisions as suggestions.

The surge in recorded enforcement cases suggests Britain's family courts have been operating with a massive blind spot. For years, judges made orders they couldn't track and families received judgments that weren't properly enforced. The new data doesn't show more problems — it shows we're finally counting them.

This matters because family courts touch thousands of lives every year. When a system fails to enforce its own decisions, it fails the families it's meant to protect. The 5,000% increase isn't evidence of system collapse — it's evidence that we're finally seeing what was always broken (Source: Ministry of Justice, Family Court Statistics -- Family_Court_Tables__Jul-Sep_2024_ -- Table_3).