Interpreting and Translation Services

Ian Swales Excerpts

Thursday 20th June 2013 Westminster Hall

[Ian Swales (Redcar) (LD)]

It is a pleasure, Mr Pritchard, to serve under your chairmanship. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith) not only on his diligent chairmanship of his Committee but on his comprehensive introduction to the subject today. I am a member of the Public Accounts Committee, which considered the matter on 6 December 2012 and drew some shocking conclusions.

Life on the Public Accounts Committee involves meeting twice a week and each time hearing about very different situations, usually a litany of failure or ineffectiveness. As a result, we become a little cynical or even punch drunk. However, even by those standards, the hearing on 6 December 2012 was appalling. I am reminded by the large number of people in the Public Gallery today—no doubt some of them are personally interested in the matter—that we had a large attendance in the Public Gallery on that day. It was one of the few hearings I remember when there was shaking of heads in the Public Gallery as Ministry officials responded to the Committee. That is rare, but it happened repeatedly on that day, which says something about the officials’ complacency,

Our Committee found, not surprisingly given what we have heard, that the outsourcing of interpreter services was terribly mismanaged. We concluded that the Ministry lacked management information on the previous use of interpreters and therefore did not have a clear understanding of the requirements when contracting out the service. It did not know how much it was already spending on interpreters, or even how many interpreters were required or in what languages. As a result, the system it selected was driven by bidders’ proposals rather than the actual requirements.

Applied Language Solutions, the company that was awarded the contract, was clearly incapable of delivering on such a large contract, yet it was handed £42 million a year to cover the whole country, despite a credit rating report to the Ministry recommending that ALS should not have been awarded a contract of more than £l million. Departmental officials could not adequately explain to the Committee why it had ignored that advice. It is one thing to make such a striking error in the first place, but the Committee also found that the Ministry failed to penalise ALS effectively under the contract. Its penalty was only £2,200, and there was no penalty for the first four months when its performance was at its worst. Risible levels of penalties and low expectations of performance obviously allow private companies to get away with over-promising and under-delivering.

The Ministry should draft and implement future contracts to minimise transitional problems by piloting and rolling out new systems gradually, and incentivising contractors to meet contractual requirements from the outset—for example, through the robust use of penalties. Will the Minister tell us what penalties have been levied on Capita for failure to deliver since it took over the contract? ALS, of course, was handsomely rewarded for its failure. It sold the business on to Capita for £7.5 million only 10 months after winning the contract. As we often find on our Committee, the public sector had no say in that reassignment and certainly got no financial benefit from the on-selling. That is something we see constantly in the public sector: it is now a business to win a public sector bid or a PFI contract and then trade it on. That is how companies really make money, and ALS is a good example of it.

The Ministry estimated that it would need access to 1,200 interpreters to meet its requirements. However, it allowed the contract to go live when the supplier had only 280 interpreters ready to work under the terms of the contract. The Ministry believed that many more interpreters were available to work, in line with contractual obligations, than was actually the case, because it received over-optimistic assurances from ALS and there was confusion over definitions of what important terms such as “registered” actually meant. The Ministry was also unable to confirm that all interpreters working under the contract had the required qualifications, experience and enhanced Criminal Records Bureau checks.

The company was only able to meet 58% of its bookings, initially, against a target of 98%, which is entirely unacceptable. As previous speakers have said, it is not only about the mechanics of the contract; we are talking about people’s lives and life-changing decisions that may be made on their behalf. People who needed the services have paid a heavy price for the Ministry’s incompetence. We have seen a sharp rise in the number of ineffective trials, as others have said. A trial was recently cancelled in my area because, unbelievably, the chosen interpreter was on trial in a neighbouring court at the same time. Extra costs for the Ministry are then incurred by unnecessary trial postponements and delays. Those costs have not been revealed but they will almost certainly be far more than the money saved on the contract, and I urge the Ministry to measure the waste in the courts system caused by the problem.

Whatever value-for-money considerations drove the original decision will now bear little relation to what has actually happened. It seems certain that there has been a net cost rather than a net benefit to the justice system. In short, the Public Accounts Committee found that the process descended into total chaos, and that almost everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. I hope that the Ministry will follow up the recommendations of the PAC, the Justice Committee and the National Audit Office in order to clean up the mess. Given the large potential contracts that the Ministry is looking to award, it has a lot to do to convince the public that it has learnt the lessons, and that contracts such as those involving legal aid and rehabilitation—

[Sir Alan Beith]

Before my hon. Friend concludes, I wanted to put this point to him, which is not always recognised or understood by people. What has happened in this case, as is proposed in the case of legal aid, is that instead of outsourcing to a very large number of small, usually one-person businesses and making an assessment as to whether they are capable of doing it, the whole process of obtaining interpreters has been outsourced. It has been done on such a large scale that few organisations in the country would be able to do it.

[Ian Swales]

My right hon. Friend makes a valuable point, which is of great concern to the Public Accounts Committee. We seem to have a number of Government Departments that—I suppose it is belt and braces—are making the outsourcing, or contracting-out process, so complicated that now only four or five companies can win the bid. The whole job is how a bid is won and not what the service is, because frequently the people who win the bids do not do the work. Eddie Stobart will not be providing legal aid; its expertise is winning a Government bid. That is the almost farcical situation that we have now got into. The Ministry needs to learn the lessons from that process, particularly as it seems to be about to do some very similar things on a much bigger scale.

One of the other issues that we have—we use the expression on our Committee “following the public pound” —is that the more this type of thing happens, the less access the National Audit Office has to the people who are doing the work. If the services are run by the Department, the NAO can be all over them, but typically, the contracts do not provide transparency or access, so our auditors are unable to get into the key providers.

In summary, the Minister needs to convince us about the lessons learnt, and about what improvement actions will be taken. I feel—not my Committee but I, personally—that a lot of scrutiny by a lot of people should take place before we walk into the same trap again, and I fear that the Public Accounts Committee may have a lot more work coming down the road towards it.

[Mark Pritchard (in the Chair)]

Before I call John Mann, to be helpful, I just say that I intend to start the wind-ups at 2.30 pm.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs Grant]

Let me make some progress, and I will give way later.

Remuneration now more closely reflects the work being undertaken and is more closely aligned to the rates on offer for similarly qualified people in other public services. We do not deny that there were teething problems during the early stages of the new contract, and as the Ministry said in its response to the Justice Committee’s report, the initial performance was not satisfactory. Contingency plans were put in place quickly and had a direct effect. Disruption was kept to a minimum; we pushed Capita to improve matters urgently; and there was a significant outlay of investment on its part to improve services.

In the year 30 January 2012 to 31 January 2013, there were more than 131,000 requests for language services, covering 259 different languages, and the overall success rate was at 90%. That is a significant improvement on the 67% successful booking rate in February 2012. The number of complaints received, as against the number of bookings made, has fallen significantly. From February 2012 to August 2012, complaints fell from 10.6% to 1.7% in criminal courts; from 6.3% to 0.8% in civil and family courts; and from 19.2% to 5.6% in tribunals.

We take our responsibilities seriously, and we have ensured that each complaint is investigated. As has been said during the debate, lessons must be learned. I can assure hon. Members that lessons truly are being learned.

[Ian Swales]

A 90% success rate can also be described as a 10% failure rate. Can the Minister remind the House what success percentage was expected in the contract? On the point I made in my speech, what fines have Capita had for failing to meet the standards of the contract?

[Mrs Grant]

The ideal success rate is 98% and I believe the fines were approximately £1,400 or £1,500. I can get that figure for my hon. Friend, but 98% is what we are aiming at and what we are determined to achieve. I am confident that we will.

We have acknowledged and acted on many of the points rightly raised by the Justice Committee, the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee, and we have genuinely gone right back to the contract to see where changes could benefit performance. We are not complacent; we continue to meet the challenges head on. For the first time, we can honestly say that we have a system that delivers a sustainable service and includes easily quantifiable standards—a system in which people in the justice sector can have confidence. Improvements have been made, but we have more work to do and we will endeavour to do it.

I would like to respond to some of the key aspects of the Justice Committee’s report. Many questions have been asked of the Government today, but I will do my best to respond to a number of the specific issues raised, starting with remuneration. The framework agreement between the Ministry and Capita has allowed us to make significant savings of some £16.7 million in the first year. Such savings are much needed in the current financial climate, but I recognised that the savings were affecting performance and we therefore ploughed an estimated £2.9 million of them back into the system. As I announced in the House on 25 April, the Department has amended the terms of the contract with Capita to increase remuneration for interpreters. The terms now include cancellation fees and greater rewards for more highly qualified interpreters.