A mother in Manchester waits for her ex-partner to pay the £400 monthly child support the court ordered him to provide. He hasn't paid in six months. She files for a recovery order to force him to comply. In 2022, she would have been one of nearly 200 cases. This year, she's one of just 49.

Recovery orders are the family court's tool for chasing parents who ignore child support arrangements. When someone stops paying what they owe, the other parent can ask for a recovery order to get the money back. It's meant to be the safety net that ensures children don't lose out when one parent walks away from their responsibilities.

That safety net just collapsed. Recovery orders fell from 198 cases in 2022 to just 49 in 2023. That's a 75% drop in a single year, according to Ministry of Justice data.

This isn't about fewer people needing help. Divorce rates haven't plummeted. Single-parent households haven't vanished. The Child Maintenance Service, which handles most child support cases, is processing more applications than ever. So why are recovery orders disappearing?

The decline suggests the family court system is quietly stepping back from enforcement. Either parents have stopped bothering to ask for recovery orders because they don't work, or courts have stopped granting them, or the process has become so difficult that people give up before they get to court.

None of these explanations is good news for the children caught in the middle. When parents don't pay child support, it's not an abstract policy failure. It means school trips that don't happen, clothes that don't get replaced, and household budgets stretched even thinner during a cost-of-living crisis.

The timing makes this worse. Family finances are under more pressure now than they've been in decades. Housing costs are rising, energy bills remain high, and food prices haven't come back down. This is precisely when child support enforcement should be getting stronger, not weaker.

Recovery orders were never the most common tool for chasing unpaid child support, but they were important for the most stubborn cases. When other methods failed, recovery orders were supposed to be the court saying: pay up or face consequences. If courts are issuing 75% fewer of them, that's 75% fewer parents getting the message that non-payment has real consequences.

The data doesn't tell us why this happened. It doesn't explain whether this is a deliberate policy shift, a resource problem, or courts deciding that recovery orders don't work well enough to justify the effort. What it does tell us is that the system designed to protect children's financial security just got much weaker, at exactly the moment families needed it to be stronger.