EU: Interpretation and Translation in Criminal Proceedings

Debate between Baroness Thomas of Winchester and Lord McNally

Monday 9th July 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally]

There is not an independent monitoring system—there is a client. We are the client, and we do not intend to pay good money for a shoddy service. As I have just said, as the client we brought this in because we intended to try to make substantial savings for the taxpayer on a system that we believed was slipshod and expensive in its running. When the new system gets bedded down, we hope that it will give high quality. The monitoring is done by the department concerned, the MoJ, and we intend to carry out our responsibilities to make sure that the taxpayer gets value for money.

[Baroness Thomas of Winchester]

My Lords, I understand my noble friend’s difficulties, about which he has been telling the House, with so many languages having to be covered. Will he tell us how many cases have had to be rescheduled because the right interpreters were not there, and whether that is being monitored by his department?

[Lord McNally]

There has always been the problem of interpreters not being there, or the wrong interpreters being there. This is not something that has happened in the past 12 months. Indeed, one reason for bringing in a single supplier on a new contract with very precise contractual obligations was to try to remove that. I repeat that providing around 100,000 interpreters in 142 different languages is something of which our justice system should be rather proud. However, once you operate on that scale across that range of expertise, there will be mistakes, hiccups, wrong directions and wrong turn-ups. On the whole, we expect the contract to produce at least 98% performance success, and we intend to keep the contractor to that.