Interpreting and Translation Services

Alan Johnson Excerpts

Thursday 20th June 2013 Westminster Hall

[Alan Johnson (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to enter this debate under your chairmanship, Mr Pritchard. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith) on producing this report. I am not a member of the Select Committee on Justice or the Public Accounts Committee, and members of those Committees will have given far more detailed scrutiny to the issues covered in the report. However, a constituent of mine, Madeleine Lee, a court interpreter, told me in my constituency surgery in 2009 that a de facto pilot was going on in Greater Manchester, and she explained what the consequences would be, were it spread across the country.

All Members of Parliament diligently follow what our constituents wish, but when we are in government we have responsibility. I was Home Secretary at the time, but I spoke to the then Lord Chancellor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw). The previous system emerged from the Runciman royal commission after a scandalous miscarriage of justice due to the absence of interpreting services, and it was set up not too long ago, in the late ’90s. As the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed said, my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn accepted that the system was not perfect and that we needed to consider efficiency savings. We concluded that we would have to be very cautious about destroying something that, since Runciman, had given court interpretation a level of quality that it did not have before; that was largely the result of setting up the national register of professional service interpreters. I have followed the issue from a distance ever since.

As a former Minister, I have been at the rough end of several Select Committee reports in my time, but I have never known three reports—the National Audit Office memorandum, the Public Accounts Committee report and now the Justice Committee’s report—to be so consistent in their condemnation of a Government policy. A number of conclusions can be drawn from those reports. First, there were no fundamental problems with the original procedures. Secondly, the Ministry of Justice changed those procedures without understanding their complexities, or indeed the professionalism of the people providing the services. This is a caricature, but it seems that someone who knows a bit of holiday Spanish can now come in and do a job in the courts, which has proved to be disastrous. Thirdly, the MOJ awarded the contract to a company, ALS, that is totally incapable of fulfilling its requirements. Surely there can be little doubt about that. I do not think there are many people in this debate who will be arguing on the Government’s side, apart from the poor Under-Secretary of State for Justice, the hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Mrs Grant).

The final conclusion is that justice and the right to a fair trial have been seriously compromised as a result of this debacle. The added dimension, which the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed mentioned, is that the MOJ sought to prevent a Committee of this House receiving first-hand testimony on the contract’s failings, which is a very serious allegation that the House must treat with due seriousness.

Following the damning series of reports, the Lord Chancellor’s latest letter to me—I have kept up correspondence on the issue since the 2010 general election —tells me that there has been a £15 million saving. Quality standards have diminished, the courts have made 6,417 complaints about poor standards, and 608 magistrates court trials and 34 Crown court trials were recorded as ineffective in 2012 because interpreters were not available, which is a 100% increase. There is a great deal of doubt about the £15 million figure, as the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed and others have suggested. We hear that 48% of cases are now dealt with outside the contract, and there are various other factors that make the £15 million figure questionable. Even if the figure is true, £15 million is the kind of small change that falls down the back of the sofas in the offices of Secretaries of State. Even if the measure has saved £15 million, the resultant chaos in the Courts Service and the destruction of the quality of what was a very highly regarded system surely does not justify that level of savings, and it is doubtful whether such savings have been made anyway.

I see that the Lord Chancellor’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, the hon. Member for Ilford North (Mr Scott), is in his place behind the Under-Secretary, who just happened to be in the Department when the music stopped. She was not in her present position when it started; I believe she was then a member of the Select Committee that has been scrutinising the matter.

Perhaps we would have made the changes, too. Who knows? Despite my discussions with the Lord Chancellor, we should not be trying to score party political points. In government, Ministers reach a stage where they see that the only way to salvage their reputation following a clearly big mistake is to accept that it is a big mistake and do something about it. The Government should pull out of the contract, negotiate with professional linguists and do all the things that should have been done beforehand. My conclusion, following the grand reports from different Committees, is that my constituent, Madeleine Lee, was right.