As Tories call for rethinking the £4 billion Parliament revamp and Reform plans to keep the budget watchdog, there's another number buried in government data that deserves attention: Britain's family courts issued 930 orders to obtain information about missing children in 2023.

The year before? They issued exactly one.

This isn't a gradual increase or a policy change you'd have heard about. It's a 92,900% surge in a single court order type that barely existed before 2023. The 'Authority to obtain information on missing child' order went from statistical irrelevance to nearly a thousand cases in twelve months. (Source: Ministry of Justice, Family Court Statistics -- Family_Court_Tables__Jul-Sep_2024_ -- Table_4)

What changed? The data doesn't explain the mechanics, but the scale suggests something systematic. Either hundreds more children went missing, or the courts started using these orders for cases they'd handled differently before. Neither interpretation is particularly comforting.

Each order represents a child whose whereabouts are unknown to the point where courts need legal authority just to gather information about them. These aren't custody disputes or routine welfare checks — they're cases serious enough to require judicial intervention to find basic information about where a child might be.

The timing matters too. This explosion happened during 2023, a year when social services were already stretched thin, schools were dealing with persistent absence rates, and families were struggling with the cost-of-living crisis. Children don't just vanish — they slip through cracks that have widened.

Compare this to the political conversations dominating headlines. MPs are debating whether to spend billions renovating their workplace, while family courts are quietly processing nearly a thousand cases involving children who've essentially disappeared from official view. One gets parliamentary debates and media attention. The other gets buried in quarterly statistics.

The contrast is stark: one missing child order in 2022, 930 in 2023. That's not administrative tidying or improved record-keeping. That's nearly three cases every working day of children serious enough to warrant judicial orders just to find out where they are.

While politicians argue about budget watchdogs and building renovations, this data suggests a different kind of emergency — one measured not in billions of pounds, but in hundreds of children who've slipped out of sight.