How fast can a number grow if no time passes at all?

Here is the answer, courtesy of the family courts. The Ministry of Justice records 553 parental responsibility orders in 2023. The comparison value sitting alongside it is 5. Both carry the same year label. Run the arithmetic and you get a change of 10,960%, which is another way of saying the figure is 110.6 times larger than the thing it is being measured against. (Source: Ministry of Justice, Family Court Statistics -- Family_Court_Tables__Jul-Sep_2024_ -- Table_3)

Take the headline count on its own and it is a real, human number. A parental responsibility order is the legal instrument that settles who counts as a parent in the eyes of the law: who can consent to surgery, who signs the school forms, who has standing when a family falls apart. Five hundred and fifty-three of those in a year works out at roughly ten or eleven a week, every week, across England and Wales. That is a courtroom deciding the legal status of a parent twice on a typical working day.

Now take the 5. Whatever it represents, it cannot sensibly be the same measure over the same period. Two values a hundred-fold apart, sharing a year, in the same table, is not a trend. It is a labelling problem.

The most likely reading is dull and technical. Family court tables carry dozens of order types, split by applicant, by quarter, by court tier and by whether an order was applied for or made. A figure of 5 could be a single quarter of a narrow subcategory, or a residual "other" line, or a provisional count that a later revision replaced. None of that would be a scandal. It would simply mean the two cells were never meant to be read against each other, and something in the extraction stitched them together anyway.

That is exactly the point. These tables are published as open data precisely so that people outside the department can use them, and a spreadsheet that produces a 10,960% jump inside a single calendar year is a spreadsheet that will be misread. Someone will quote it. Probably already has.

Worth saying plainly: this is not fresh data. The 553 covers the 2023 calendar year and appears in the quarterly release covering July to September 2024. By the time you read this, the courts have moved on by two years. Any story about what is happening in family courts *now* cannot be told with it.

My view, and it is a view rather than a finding: the fix is trivial and the department should make it. Label every cell with the period it actually covers, flag provisional and revised figures in the file itself rather than in a footnote three tabs away, and never let two incompatible measures share a year label in the same row. Statistical agencies are judged on the numbers people can check. This one cannot be checked from the file alone.

If you want to know what the 5 really is, you are entitled to ask. Requests to the Ministry of Justice can be filed and read publicly on WhatDoTheyKnow, where the answer stays visible to everyone who comes looking next.