A single parent in Manchester waits months for a court order to recover their child from an ex-partner who's refusing contact. The case drags on, legal costs mount, and the system that's supposed to help families reunite is falling apart — one collapsed court order at a time.

While Tories call for a rethink of Parliament's £14 billion revamp, Britain's family courts are experiencing their own crisis that's getting no headlines. Recovery orders — the legal mechanism that helps parents get their children back when custody arrangements break down — have collapsed by 75.3% in a single year.

The numbers are stark. In 2022, family courts issued 198 recovery orders. By 2023, that figure had crashed to just 49 (Source: Ministry of Justice, Family Court Statistics -- Family_Court_Tables__Jul-Sep_2024_ -- Table_4). That's not a gradual decline — it's a system in freefall.

Recovery orders exist for the worst-case scenarios: when one parent refuses to return a child after agreed contact, when court-ordered arrangements are being ignored, when families need urgent legal intervention. These aren't administrative paperwork — they're emergency measures for children caught in the middle of family breakdown.

The collapse raises uncomfortable questions about what's happening to those cases that would have become recovery orders. Are families giving up on the courts entirely? Are children staying with parents who shouldn't have them? Are legal costs putting justice out of reach?

This isn't happening in isolation. Family court backlogs have been growing for years, legal aid cuts have left parents representing themselves, and court closures mean longer delays for urgent cases. When the system takes months to process what should be emergency orders, parents stop trusting it to work.

The human cost is invisible in the statistics but real in living rooms across Britain. Every missing recovery order represents a family where the legal system has failed to protect a child's right to see both parents. It represents contact arrangements that exist on paper but not in practice.

While Westminster argues about renovation costs for its own building, the courts that serve ordinary families are crumbling in real time. Recovery orders might seem like a technical legal category, but they're actually a canary in the coal mine — when emergency family interventions drop by three-quarters, the entire system is breaking down.

The Ministry of Justice has been quiet about this collapse. No press releases, no explanations, no action plan. Just 149 fewer families getting the legal help they desperately needed in 2023 compared to the year before.