Slow progress: improving data about the family justice system | [2026] Fam Law 321 | March 2026

Caitlin O’Shaughnessy, Researcher, Nuffield Family Justice Observatory

A longstanding critique

2026 Groundhog Day

*To the best of author’s knowledge. This is based on whether data is available to the public and/or researchers.

Several reports subsequent to the Family Justice Review have drawn attention to the poor data in the family justice system. Both the Justice Committee and Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons, for example, have raised concerns.⁶ In 2019 Dr Natalie Byrom, then Director of Research at the Legal Education Foundation, was seconded to the HMCTS for three months to review the service's overall data strategy. Byrom's report⁷ drew attention to many data gaps, and, in particular, to the justice system's failure to collect demographic information in line with its Public Sector Equality Duty. As well as having responsibilities as defined by the 2010 Equality Act,⁸ HMCTS and the Ministry of Justice have a stated interest in understanding how the justice system affects different users and want to support vulnerable people.⁹ Yet even the new HMCTS case management system does not record some basic demographic information such as ethnicity and disability status.

Then, in 2023, as part of the Sir Andrew McFarlane's reforms to improve the transparency of the family courts, the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) was asked to review the state of family justice data.¹⁰ The researchers mapped what data was available against a simple framework, on the assumption that whether a professional working in the system, a court user or member of the public, information is needed to answer six critical questions:

(1)     What has happened to a family before they come to court?
(2)     Who comes to court?
(3)     What are their experiences of court?
(4)     How is the family court operating?
(5)     What decisions are being made about children?
(6)     What are the immediate and longer-term outcomes of those decisions?

The NatCen research team found that there were limited data to answer any of these six key questions. Some data was not being captured at all, some data was being captured in a way that is difficult to use (for example because it only exists in case files), and there was a lack of routine and timely data linked to other datasets. In particular, NatCen highlighted the notable absence of data on the support provided to families before they enter court proceedings and what happens to families after court decisions.

Report after report, group after group, have made the same point: the family justice system lags far behind other public services in terms of data availability and quality. The system is frequently described as 'operating in the dark' and without the necessary data to demonstrate that professionals, and the decisions they make, actually help children involved in proceedings.

What has changed?

Despite this continuing and damning critique of the state of family justice data, it is important to recognise that some progress has been made over the last 15 years. Cafcass, Cafcass Cymru and HMCTS have all made improvements to their management information systems. In particular, Cafcass and Cafcass Cymru have addressed some of the data gaps and improved the quality of their data. For example, in their latest annual report, Cafcass note that known ethnicity is now recorded for 94% of children in public law proceedings, a marked improvement in the last decade: before 2016, ethnicity data was recorded for less than one-third of children.¹¹

In 2012 a new HMCTS Case Monitoring System was launched, with the aim to be able to track care cases and provide data on the causes of delay. At the time, Justice Minister Lord McNally described it as 'a big step towards reversing the lack of quality data, something which has previously hindered attempts to understand and reform the family justice system'.¹² The new system did not quite live up to this description, and more recent reform has been necessary, including the development of a new case management system. This new system aims to be easier for users to navigate, facilitate data linkage for court staff, provide more detailed information about case duration and record judicial resources required in public law cases. HMCTS has built a new strategic data platform to bring its data into one place where it can be processed more efficiently and used more effectively to improve service delivery. The data now provided to Local Family Justice Boards on a regular basis to monitor performance, although still limited in terms of the ability to track children through the family justice system or compare different geographical areas, has nonetheless started to improve.

There have also been several attempts to link the different datasets held by Cafcass, Cafcass Cymru, HMCTS and local authorities, in order to better understand children's and families' journeys through the family justice system. In 2018 the Ministry of Justice ran a two month pilot to allow researchers to access, via a secure datalab, a bespoke dataset,¹³ linking data from the family courts, education, Cafcass and children's social care. Although a one-off exercise, it demonstrated the potential value of linked data sets to better understand the family justice system.¹⁴ For two years (2018 and 2019) the Ministry of Justice also publicly shared some of this linked data via a Public Law Applications to Orders ('PLATO') tool, a data visualisation tool to help understand the demand for care proceedings and the rate at which these applications convert into final court orders, allowing for comparison across different geographical regions and over time.

In 2019 The Ministry of Justice launched a 'Data First' programme, an ambitious project funded by Administrative Data Research UK, to link and provide access to justice data for researchers. This programme has enabled Cafcass data and HMCTS family court data to be linked, offering the potential for researchers to track cases from application through to final order for the first time.¹⁵ Progress has been slow and beset by problems of data quality and research using linkage to family court data still very much in its infancy. However, the promise of uncovering important new insights remains. Equivalent research linking children's social care data with other datasets (such as health and education data) has helped researchers to examine complex child welfare issues.¹⁶ The opportunities for using data linkage to better understand children's journeys through the family justice system have been greater in Wales, which benefits from many more government datasets being shared with the Secure Anonymised Information Linkage ('SAIL') Databank at Swansea University. More recently ADR England has established a Community Catalyst¹⁷ to try to encourage more researchers to use administrative data to find ways to improve the lives of children known to children's services and who are at risk of poor outcomes.

The creation of two new organisations have also helped to shine a light on the data improvements needed in the family justice system. The establishment of an Office of the Domestic Abuse Commissioner, under the 2021 Domestic Abuse Act, has led to a focus on improving data relating to domestic abuse. This is much needed given there is no consistent record of cases involving allegations of domestic abuse despite their high prevalence in family cases. The Office of the Domestic Abuse Commissioner has piloted a 'review and reporting mechanism' to track the family court's response to domestic abuse and has proposed that the Ministry of Justice commit resource and funding to continue this.¹⁸

And the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory was set up in the wake of the findings of the Family Justice Review to bring data and research to the attention of professionals in the family justice system. Being independent of the family justice system, the Observatory has no power to change data collection or dissemination. But it has nonetheless been able to communicate publicly available data through its publications, website and regular bulletins, facilitate the deposit of Cafcass and Cafcass Cymru data into the SAIL Databank at Swansea University to enable it to be analysed and linked to other datasets for analysis¹⁹ and publish multiple studies of new analysis of data and linked data. Among other things, this has shone a light for the first time on the rising number of babies in care proceedings, the characteristics of families in private law proceedings, and the number of children subject to deprivation of liberty orders.

Looking ahead there are also hopeful signs of change on the horizon. The digitalisation of the family court services started a decade ago, with the aim of enabling users and professionals to manage cases digitally, reducing effort and cost. This shift to digital (and the potential of AI) offers the prospect of collating, analysing and sharing data much more efficiently. The government has also committed to establish a Single Unique Identifier for each child which will enable data to be linked more easily across different public services. And from 2027 the Department for Education plans to publish data relating to pre-proceedings, which will allow a better sense of children's and families' journey into family court proceedings.²⁰

But why is change so slow?

Despite these important changes, it is hard to escape the conclusion that progress in improving family justice data has been remarkably slow. The question is why?

The answer has nothing to do with the clarity of the critique of the current state of family justice data. This has been set out time and time again. The reason why family justice data has been slow to improve is because it is not obvious how to improve it. Time and again we return to 'why' family justice data needs to improve, rather than 'how' to improve it.

It is tempting to apportion blame for the slow progress to the lack of sustained political attention given to the family justice system, in stark contrast to the criminal justice system. There is little doubt that the family justice system is lower down the justice pecking order – both in terms of political attention and resources. With concerns about difficulties in family relationships registering lower than crime among the public, much less political attention and resources is given to it. This is made somewhat worse by the fact that responsibility for the family justice system is shared between the Ministry of Justice (for private law) and the Department for Education (for public law), with neither fully stepping into the driving seat.

But even with more attention and resources it is not immediately clear how transformation in family justice data could be achieved. A major impediment is that there is no one agency or department responsible for overseeing such a change.

Family justice data is collected by a number of different departments and agencies, each with their own objectives and priorities. A report by the Institute for Government identified that HMCTS is focused on operating the courts, the judiciary is focused on an accurate record of what happens in court, the Ministry of Justice is concerned with people's experiences of the justice system and Cafcass is focused on representing children and young people in family proceedings²¹. In addition the Department for Education and local authorities hold children's social care data about what happens to children and families before and after public law proceedings. This fragmented landscape leaves no single body with responsibility for overall data strategy.

Notably the 2011 Family Justice Review sought to address this problem by recommending that a Family Justice Service should be established, with responsibility for understanding the needs of the family justice system and overseeing its performance. The Review's Panel suggested that this Service should be charged with the collation and monitoring of performance data, including spending. The Panel also envisaged that the Family Justice Service would oversee the dissemination of up-to-date research and analysis of the needs, views and development of children.

Having a single body with responsibility for the overall performance of the family justice system would clearly provide a 'home' for a unified data strategy. But for a data strategy to be meaningful, it cannot exist in isolation. It has to serve an overarching set of objectives for the family justice system.²²

Currently, the only shared objectives for the family justice system relate to timeliness. The priorities and targets agreed at the March 2025's National Family Justice Board concerned the size of the caseload and how long cases take to complete. Timeliness is the only indicator of success that all the relevant agencies currently buy into, yet this does not tell us whether the family justice system is achieving its purpose (only whether it is working quickly). Ultimately, data needs to tell us whether the family justice system is operating fairly, efficiently and effectively – to the benefit of the people who use it.

A way forward?

The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee recently noted: 'There is no shared strategy for the whole [family justice] system'.²³ This criticism has been met by an acknowledgment by the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Education that having such a strategy would be desirable.

This offers the opportunity to address one of the underlying concerns expressed by the 2011 Family Justice Review, that the family justice system was (and is) not operating like a system:

'We found general agreement with our diagnosis: a system that is not a system, characterised by mutual distrust and a lack of leadership, by incoherence and without solid evidence based knowledge about how it really works.'²⁴

The development of a family justice strategy, if undertaken in an inclusive way, involving all representatives of professionals within the family justice system, could lead to clarity about the family justice system's shared purpose and its short, medium and long term objectives. In this way, a family justice strategy is the first step; a family justice data strategy would follow naturally.

If such a strategy was accompanied by improvements to the governance of the family justice system, to address the weakness that currently exists in national governance (in the Family Justice Board) and local governance (in Local Family Justice Boards), a family justice strategy would have a chance of being translated into practice. Whether a Family Justice Service is what is needed is open to debate; that changes in governance are needed is beyond doubt.

It is these issues that hold the key to improving data in the family justice system: clarifying the objectives for the family justice system (against which data can be collected) and ensuring that there are national and local governance mechanisms through which data can be monitored and acted upon.

The legacy of the 2011 Family Justice Review was a sharp critique of the state of data in the family justice system, but in the intervening years this critique has simply been echoed and amplified in subsequent reports and initiatives. The slow pace of progress is particularly frustrating when you consider the advances in data capture and data analytics that have taken place in the intervening years. Having good data is essential, both to ensure that services are meeting the needs of children and families and to increase wider public understanding of family justice. It is time to move forward and create the conditions under which change is possible.