Interpreting and Translation Services

Gerald Kaufman Excerpts

Thursday 20th June 2013 Westminster Hall

[Sir Gerald Kaufman (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab)]

I, too, congratulate the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith) on initiating the debate and on the report of his Select Committee.

The right hon. Gentleman is known in the House for his understatement, and that is typified by his description of the system under the new contract as “shambolic”. That is as over-kind a description as it is possible to find. All the available information shows that the system is not only failing abjectly, but damaging seriously the administration of justice in this country. In addition, it is costing the taxpayer huge sums of money in abandoned trials and in other ways.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

Does my right hon. Friend not think that the lesson can be drawn wider than for the translation services alone? The Ministry of Justice and others are obsessed with the contract culture. It distances Ministers from the immediacy of decisions and, at the other end, leaves the public and the victims in a much worse situation, with much less accountability on the delivery of services.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Gerald Kaufman]

I of course agree with my hon. Friend. The problem is that the Ministry of Justice has been administered with, on the one hand, a great deal of indolence, which is the charming characteristic of the previous Secretary of State—for which we are all fond of him—and, on the other, miscalculation. I offer my sympathy to the Minister, who has the awful problem of responding to the debate convincingly and at the same time honestly, but I point out that interfering with a system that works for ideological reasons is as barmy a reason as there ever was. If I have learned one rule during my time in the House it is, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The system was not broken—it worked perfectly well—and, because of an obsession of the kind that my hon. Friend described, we now have an unbelievable mess.

A number of my constituents have approached me about the matter, including Ali Hetherington, who has provided me with a good deal of information. She told me that the Ministry of Justice’s own performance figures indicate that levels of complaints and the number of ineffective trials relating to interpreter provision have risen steeply and shown no sign of abating. The Minister talks about savings of £15 million. The statistics provided to her by her officials cannot be verified or established in any way. First, we do not know what the savings are. Secondly, the calculation of those savings does not seem to take into account the huge sums of money that have been lost through failed and delayed trials and other failings in magistrates and Crown courts caused by taking on Capita to carry out the job.

Quality standards for court interpreters have been so dramatically lowered that the substandard service provided by Capita is in no way comparable with the quality of previous provision.

Let us look at the record. Capita took over the contract on 30 January 2012. Not once has it achieved its target for interpreter requests. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson) said, there have been 6,417 complaints and more than 600 court trials have been abandoned over a 12-month period due to lack of interpreters, and the Ministry of Justice calls that a dramatic improvement. I would love to know what it would call a deterioration. Last month, Capita provided only 48% of required interpreters. Throughout the period of the contract, it has operated in breach of its contract. It has doubled the number of ineffective trials, primarily due to interpreter incapability, compared with a stable level in the previous five years.

I have been provided with a dossier of evidence, which no doubt other right hon. and hon. Members have seen. The indictment is appalling. We are talking about the justice system, and people being put on trial and being found guilty or not guilty. We are talking about what happens to their lives and the lives of their victims as a result of failed trials. In the dozens of examples in the dossier, again and again, interpreters have turned up late or not at all, or they did not speak the language they were hired to interpret. In an example on page 16, an interpreter who spoke Bengali turned up to deal with someone in the court who spoke the Congolese language of Lingala. Not only was the language wrong, but it was spoken on the wrong continent. That happens again and again.

I will give some more examples from the dossier. In one, a barrister said that in

“court this morning a Lithuanian interpreter…turned up for a Slovakian prisoner”.

It was just as well they both spoke Polish. In another case, there was no interpreter for a Kurdish appellant. The court asked for one, but it was not provided, and the case was adjourned to the following week. In a London court, a sex trial failed to proceed because the interpreter failed to attend. The waste of money was £10,000, and the witnesses were devastated. The dossier also states that, in another case, there were no

“Punjabi interpreters in London so”

one came from Derby, five hours late and left before seeing the client in the cells after the hearing. It would be difficult to invent such incidents, yet they happened and we are told that it is all part of a dramatic improvement. Another example came from Birmingham Crown court:

“Earlier this month I worked at one of my local police stations (they are not with Capita). The duty solicitor was appalled by the quality of Capita interpreters. He told me that apparently those who are Tier 3 cannot speak English, one Capita interpreter sent his brother-in-law to Birmingham Crown Court for a trial, because he couldn't make it himself...I got the impression that the brother-in-law wasn't even an interpreter. Apparently the judge was furious”.

If there is one thing this country should be proud of above all else it is the administration of justice. People’s lives, the state of law and respect for the law all depend on sound administration of justice. Over and again, that is not happening because of the contract. Will the Minister answer the following questions? First, how long does the contract last? Secondly, how much does it cost? Thirdly, has there been any attempt to calculate the cost to the court system of the huge number of Capita’s failures in what, for want of other words, I will call its interpretation system, and what penalties are there?

The view of many people who have been damaged by the system is that the contract should be ended immediately. How can it be ended and why have the Government not done so? It is a sad day for this country that the system of justice of which we are so proud is so flawed as a result of the Government’s action, which should never have taken place.