Family Proceedings
(asked on 29th October 2026) - View Source
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, to break down the time it took for private-law Children Act cases to go from commencement to disposal by number of weeks for cases commenced in each of the last five years.
The following table shows the average and longest time between case start and disposal for private law cases in England and Wales, by the year the case started.
Year | Number of cases starting and disposed | Up to 26 weeks | More than 26 to 52 weeks | More than 52 to 100 weeks | More than 100 weeks | Mean weeks | Longest duration (weeks) |
2020 | 43,006 | 16,134 | 13,898 | 8,985 | 3,989 | 45 | 327 |
2021 | 41,962 | 14,384 | 13,386 | 10,236 | 3,956 | 47 | 269 |
2022 | 41,093 | 15,488 | 13,851 | 9,019 | 2,735 | 42 | 229 |
2023 | 41,329 | 17,537 | 13,983 | 8,154 | 1,655 | 37 | 180 |
2024 | 40,862 | 20,403 | 13,280 | 6,771 | 408 | 31 | 129 |
2025 | 34,681 | 23,000 | 10,231 | 1,450 | 0 | 22 | 77 |
The data provided is up to the end of December 2025.
1) Timeliness is a case-level measure that looks at the average number of weeks from application to final disposal before the case is closed for the first time. This doesn’t take into consideration if the case is reopened after the case is closed for the first time.
2) As data comes from a live administrative system, the figures in this table may differ slight from those published in Family Courts Statistics Quarterly publication (as these figures take into consideration changes recorded onto the HMCTS FamilyMan and Core Case Data system).
3) Data is given by the year that the Private Law case starts. This differs to the timeliness measure published in Family Courts Statistics Quarterly, where it is by the year that the case is disposed.