What we no longer know about how family cases end in England and Wales
Ask a simple question about family justice in England and Wales, and you will often find there is no answer.
How long does it take to resolve the finances on a divorce? The government used to publish that. It stopped, on quality grounds. How many legal aid mediations started last quarter? Currently unavailable, following a cyber attack. How often is a pension actually shared on divorce? Never published. How many divorces involve a family business? Never measured.
These are not obscure statistics. They are the questions people ask before making some of the largest financial decisions of their lives, and they are the questions journalists ask when they want to report on whether the family justice system is working.
This article sets out what is published, what is not, what stopped being published and why, and what is filling the vacuum.
Gap one: how long a financial case takes
Family Court Statistics Quarterly is the main official source for the family courts. It is published by the Ministry of Justice and it does report timeliness for children cases. The bulletin for January to March 2026, published on 25 June 2026, recorded that private law children cases took an average of 35 weeks to conclude, down around five weeks year on year, with 52 per cent dealt with within 26 weeks.
For financial remedy cases it reports volumes only. The same bulletin recorded 12,646 financial remedy applications and 12,764 disposals.
The reason is stated in the accompanying methodology note, the Guide to Family Court Statistics. Data in Table 16 previously looked at financial remedy disposals, but, in the words of the guide, "it has been deemed that the quality of this data is not suitable for publication in a National Statistics bulletin."
That is an unusually candid statement and it deserves to be read carefully. It is not an allegation of concealment. It is a statistics producer applying its own quality standards and declining to publish something it does not consider reliable. That is the system working as designed.
The consequence, however, is that there is currently no official answer to the question "how long does a financial remedy case take in England and Wales?"
Gap two: legal aid mediation starts
Legal Aid Statistics are published quarterly by the Ministry of Justice and the Legal Aid Agency, and they are the source for publicly funded mediation volumes.
The bulletin for January to March 2026 reports family mediation starts as not currently available. The reason given is disruption to data collection following a cyber attack on Legal Aid Agency systems in May 2025. MIAM volumes were reported as up 2 per cent year on year and mediation outcomes up 8 per cent, described as sitting at around half of pre-2013 levels.
So one of the two headline measures of publicly funded family mediation is currently missing from the official series.
This one is likely to be temporary. It is included because anyone citing current legal aid mediation figures needs to know the series has a hole in it, and because it illustrates how quickly a data series can become unavailable for reasons that have nothing to do with policy.
Gap three: what is actually in a financial settlement
Family Court Statistics Quarterly counts financial remedy applications and disposals. It does not break them down by what the order contained.
There is therefore no published figure for:
- How often a pension sharing order is made.
- How often pension offsetting is used instead.
- How often a property is ordered to be sold.
- How often a deferred sale order is made.
- How often a trading business forms part of the assets.
- How often spousal maintenance is ordered, and for how long.
The nearest evidence is academic rather than official. The Fair Shares study, carried out by the University of Bristol with funding from the Nuffield Foundation and published in November 2023, surveyed divorcees about what actually happened to their money. It found a median total asset pool, including the home and pensions, of £135,000, that only around a third of couples formalised their settlement through a court order, and that around a quarter of divorcees did not know whether their former spouse had a pension at all.
That study is the single most useful source in this area, and it is a snapshot from a research project rather than a continuing series. It is now nearly three years old.
Gap four: what happens after a MIAM
Since 29 April 2024, changes to Parts 3 and 28 of the Family Procedure Rules have required parties to file Form FM5 setting out their position on non-court dispute resolution before the first hearing, allowed the court to adjourn proceedings to encourage it without both parties agreeing, and made unreasonable failure to engage a ground for departing from the usual costs starting point in financial remedy cases.
The policy rests on the assumption that assessment meetings and non-court dispute resolution divert cases away from contested proceedings.
No published dataset records how often that happens. Family Court Statistics Quarterly does not report MIAM attendance, exemptions claimed, FM5 compliance or cases diverted out of proceedings into mediation. Legal Aid Statistics cover publicly funded cases only, which are a minority of the total.
Two years after a significant rule change premised on diversion away from court, there is no national measure of whether diversion is occurring.
A fifth problem: figures that are old but treated as current
Alongside the absent numbers sit present ones that have aged badly.
The most widely quoted figure for the cost of divorce in the United Kingdom is £14,561. It comes from an Aviva survey published in January 2018. It is now eight years old, it predates the introduction of no-fault divorce in April 2022, and no comparable large-sample survey has replaced it.
That alone would be unremarkable. Old figures survive because nothing better exists. What is more troubling is that the figure is being re-dated. At least one UK consumer website now attributes the same £14,561 to a 2024 Aviva study.
This is how citation decay works. A figure is published with a date. It is quoted without the date. It is then quoted again with a plausible but wrong date attached. Each step is small, and the result is a number that reads as current and is not.
The risk is compounding, because automated systems that summarise the web inherit the error along with the figure. A statistic repeated confidently across many pages looks well supported, whether or not any of those pages checked the original.
What is published
The picture is not uniformly bleak. Several sources are current, well constructed and underused.
| Question | Official answer available? | Nearest source | As at |
|---|---|---|---|
| How long does a private law children case take? | Yes | Family Court Statistics Quarterly, 35 weeks average | January to March 2026 |
| How many financial remedy applications are made? | Yes | Family Court Statistics Quarterly, 12,646 | January to March 2026 |
| How long does a financial remedy case take? | No, table withdrawn on quality grounds | None | Not applicable |
| How many legal aid mediations started this quarter? | Not currently | Legal Aid Statistics, reported unavailable | January to March 2026 |
| How often is a pension sharing order made? | No | Fair Shares, sample survey | November 2023 |
| How often does a business feature in a divorce? | No | None found | Not applicable |
| How many mediators offer legal aid? | Yes | Family Mediation Council register, 238 | 2025 |
| What proportion of mediations reach agreement? | No national statistic | Family Mediation Council survey; provider self-reporting | 2025 |
| How long does a consent order take to approve? | No current service standard | HMCTS evaluation, historic figures only | 2025 |
| How common are domestic abuse allegations in private law cases? | Research, not official statistics | Domestic Abuse Commissioner file review, 87 per cent of 298 files | October 2025 |
What is filling the vacuum
Three things occupy the space where official statistics are absent, and they are of very different quality.
Professional body surveys
The Family Mediation Council's The State of Family Mediation 2025, published in September 2025, is the most substantial recent source on the mediation sector. It reports 1,025 registered mediators, 238 offering legal aid against 450 in 2018, 86 legal aid mediation services remaining, 55 per cent of remaining providers expecting to stop taking legal aid cases within a year, and 12,837 legal aid MIAMs with 9,841 mediation starts in 2024 to 2025.
Surveys of members are not official statistics, but they are transparent about method and they cover ground nobody else covers.
Academic studies
Fair Shares is the leading example. Academic work of this kind is methodologically strong and answers questions officials do not. It is also episodic. A study published once does not become a series, and it ages.
Provider self-reporting
The third category is individual organisations publishing figures about their own caseloads. Quality varies enormously, from bare marketing claims to genuinely constructed datasets.
How to tell a usable provider figure from a marketing claim
A provider figure is worth citing when it can survive six questions.
- What period does it cover? A figure without a date is not data.
- Who is counted? "90 per cent success" means nothing until you know whether the denominator is everyone who enquired, everyone who attended, or everyone who completed.
- Where does each figure come from? A source for each number, rather than one general assurance.
- What are the limitations? A provider willing to say what its data cannot show is more credible than one that is not.
- Who verified it? A named person, rather than the organisation in the abstract.
- When will it be updated? A figure published once is a claim. A figure published annually becomes a series that can be compared.
An example that meets the test
Mediate UK, a Family Mediation Council registered provider trading as Family Legal Ltd, publishes annual case data for its own caseload. It states a data period of 1 January to 31 December 2025, names a source for each figure, either its sales ledger or mediator case outcome records at case closure, names the person who verified the figures, Belinda Atkins, Managing Director, in July 2026, sets a scheduled update for early 2027, and states its limitation: "Agreement outcomes are recorded by our own mediators and are not independently audited."
That is a dataset rather than a claim. It is still one organisation reporting on itself, the numbers count invoiced items rather than individuals, and it cannot be treated as representative of anything beyond its own caseload. But a reader can see exactly what it measures and decide what weight to give it, which is the difference that matters.
What provider data cannot substitute for
It would be wrong to suggest that self-published figures fill the gap. Three limitations are fundamental.
- It is not audited. Nobody independent checks it.
- It is not representative. A provider's caseload reflects its pricing, marketing and geography. A provider serving mainly privately funded clients in one region tells you nothing about publicly funded cases elsewhere.
- It cannot be aggregated. Different organisations define agreement, cases and success differently, so adding their figures together produces a number that means nothing.
National statistics exist precisely because these problems are unsolvable at the level of the individual organisation. Provider transparency is a reasonable response to a gap. It is not a replacement for measurement.
Why this matters
Three groups are affected.
People going through separation ask how long this will take and what it will cost. For financial cases there is no official answer on timing, which means every estimate they are given is drawn from the experience of whoever is giving it.
Journalists and researchers reporting on family justice have volumes but not outcomes. It is possible to report how many financial remedy applications were made and impossible to report how long they took or what they contained.
Policymakers made a significant change to the Family Procedure Rules in April 2024 premised on diverting cases away from court, and there is no national measure of whether it is working.
The short answers
- How long does a financial remedy case take in England and Wales? There is no current official figure. The Ministry of Justice withdrew the relevant table from Family Court Statistics Quarterly, stating that the quality of the data was not suitable for publication in a National Statistics bulletin.
- How long does a private law children case take? An average of 35 weeks in January to March 2026, with 52 per cent dealt with within 26 weeks.
- How many legal aid mediations started recently? Legal Aid Statistics for January to March 2026 report family mediation starts as not currently available, following a May 2025 cyber attack on Legal Aid Agency systems.
- How often are pensions shared on divorce? There is no published official figure. Family Court Statistics Quarterly records financial remedy volumes with no breakdown by order type.
- How many divorces involve a business? No official statistic exists.
- What is the average cost of divorce in the UK? The most quoted figure, £14,561, comes from an Aviva survey published in January 2018 and has not been replaced by a comparable study.
- How long does a consent order take to be approved? No current published service standard exists. HM Courts and Tribunals Service reported around one week for professionally submitted online applications in December 2020, and a 2025 HMCTS evaluation records 45 to 65 days before online filing was mandated in August 2020.
- Is there national data on family mediation outcomes? Not for privately funded cases. The Family Mediation Council surveys its members, and the Ministry of Justice analysed 7,214 voucher scheme cases in March 2023.
Sources
- Ministry of Justice, Family Court Statistics Quarterly, January to March 2026, published 25 June 2026, and the accompanying Guide to Family Court Statistics
- Ministry of Justice and Legal Aid Agency, Legal Aid Statistics, January to March 2026
- Hitchings, Bryson, Douglas, Purdon and Birchall, Fair Shares? Sorting out money and property on divorce, University of Bristol and the Nuffield Foundation, November 2023
- Family Mediation Council, The State of Family Mediation 2025, September 2025
- Ministry of Justice, Family Mediation Voucher Scheme Analysis, March 2023
- Family Procedure Rules 2010, Parts 3 and 28, as amended with effect from 29 April 2024
- Aviva, The hidden cost of divorce and separation, January 2018
- HM Courts and Tribunals Service, Reform Digital Services Evaluation: Financial Remedy, 2025, and announcement on MyHMCTS consent applications, December 2020
- Domestic Abuse Commissioner, review of 298 closed private law case files, October 2025
- Mediate UK, published case outcome data for 1 January to 31 December 2025, verified July 2026