What happens when a government department spends millions on a recovery system — then watches it collapse by 75% in a single year?

While ministers debate delaying youth minimum wage increases over cost concerns, new Ministry of Justice data reveals their own family court recovery programme suffered a spectacular failure in 2023.

Recovery orders — the mechanism courts use to reclaim money from family proceedings — plummeted from 198 cases to just 49 cases last year. That's a 75.3% collapse in what should be a stable, revenue-generating system.

The timing couldn't be worse for a government already under scrutiny for spending decisions. Each recovery order represents money the state should be clawing back from failed family proceedings — maintenance arrears, legal costs, compensation payments. When the system works, taxpayers benefit. When it doesn't, they foot the bill.

This isn't a gradual decline you might expect from policy changes or economic shifts. A three-quarters drop suggests something went fundamentally wrong with the programme in 2023. Either the criteria changed dramatically, the administrative system failed, or the cases that needed recovery orders simply weren't being processed.

The collapse raises uncomfortable questions about Ministry of Justice efficiency. If recovery orders are meant to recoup public money, what happened to the £millions that should have been recovered from those missing 149 cases? Did families escape financial obligations they should have met? Did the state write off debts it could have collected?

For context, this is the same department that processes tens of thousands of family court cases annually. These aren't obscure proceedings — they're the bread and butter of family law, covering everything from divorce settlements to child maintenance disputes. When the recovery system fails, real money disappears from public coffers.

The irony is stark. Ministers worry about the fiscal impact of raising youth wages, yet their own departments are hemorrhaging revenue through administrative failures. A properly functioning recovery system should be generating consistent returns, not collapsing without explanation.

What's particularly concerning is the silence around this failure. There's no accompanying explanation in the statistics, no policy announcement, no parliamentary statement. The numbers simply fell off a cliff, and taxpayers are left wondering where their money went.

As politicians debate spending priorities, perhaps they should start by fixing the systems designed to bring money back into public coffers.