Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many children have been subject to a special guardianship order in each of the last 10 years.

The Government does not collect figures in relation to how many children are subject to a special guardianship order at any one time.

However, the following table extracted from the publicly available Family Court Statistics Quarterly figures provides details on the number of children involved in orders from 2013 until 2022. Data for public law cases in 2022 has not been published due to data issues resulting from the reform of public law services.

The number of these orders has remained relatively stable over that period.