Interpreting and Translation Services

Mark Pritchard Excerpts

Thursday 20th June 2013 Westminster Hall

[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.

[John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)]

In three minutes, I will summarise my concerns for the Minister and the Chamber. I used to own a large interpreting company, and I looked at this form of interpreting and whether, even on a micro scale, it was possible to break into that market. It is not, because it is not possible to manage quality control. With other forms of interpreting, a range of techniques can be used; anyone can work through what the control mechanisms on quality should be, if they know what they are about. When it comes to this form of interpreting, that is not possible. Capita—or any other large conglomerate—cannot possibly manage quality. By definition, it does not know what the quality is, because it cannot employ the people who know what the quality is. I do not have the time to go through how techniques to do that can be devised for other forms of interpreting, but that is how I grew my business, and I grew it to a very large one.

This is nonsense, regardless of Capita, and we know how bad Capita is from the shambles that it made of the miners’ compensation scheme, when, again, it did not have the managerial experience. That was something that could have been managed, in theory, but it was hopeless. Managing quality cannot be done by a large corporate of that scale; it is not simply about Capita.

Also, the real flexibility needed in providing these services involves knowing the people because, in essence, there is a trade-off—a negotiation. The employer will say, “I desperately need you tomorrow, because we suddenly have this case”—or this prisoner, or whatever else—“and you have to do it, because I have no other option. X, Y and Z are not available; you will have to cancel your hospital appointment and do it.” That trade-off in the real world, with real people, works. Trying to put a conglomerate in charge never works, and that is why, even on a small-town basis, my company decided that it was not worth approaching Government to suggest that we attempt to run part of the system and contract in the interpreters. It is not possible, aside from the other issues of whether a company is any good or not.

That is the fundamental issue that the Ministry of Justice and the Minister need to address. They do not know what they are talking about, and they have created this system. Whoever runs it, it will not work, and it cannot work. Even if it continued on a mediocre basis, quality cannot be assured—ever. That is a fundamental problem for British justice, and it is one that the Minister needs to address. [Interruption.]

[Mark Pritchard (in the Chair)]

Order. I remind the public that we do not allow clapping in Westminster Hall.

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

You have ruined the round of applause at the end of my speech, Mr Pritchard. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship this afternoon.

If the Minister did not know at the beginning of the debate how important this issue was, she will now, from the quality of the debate and from the contributions from Members on both sides of the House, including from very senior Members of the House; and whereas it is right to say that she did not preside over the inauguration of what the Chair of the Select Committee, the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith), has called a shambles, she has been defending that shambles since she was appointed, so she does need to give some clear and full answers today.

Included in the contribution from the Chair of the Select Committee was the worrying information, which is in the report, that there was interference with the inquiry by the Ministry of Justice to prevent the fullest account of what has happened coming to light. Perhaps the Minister would like to address that and say whether she wishes to see that there is no repetition of it in the future. It is difficult not to conclude that the reason for it was that the Ministry did not want the full facts of the contract to emerge. I am delighted to hear that this is not the end of the matter for the Select Committee, because it not only has severe implications, as many hon. Members have said, for the quality and the standard of justice in our courts, but it has implications for the Ministry of Justice’s generally shambolic tendering processes.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson) said that in his experience, and looking at the three substantial reports from the NAO, the Justice Committee and the PAC, he had rarely seen such an indictment. My right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Sir Gerald Kaufman) quoted some, but only some, of the examples of failure. The dossier from which he was reading is only one of several dossiers about hundreds of individual cases that have been prepared. I was grateful for those contributions, and grateful also for the contributions from the hon. Members for Manchester, Withington (Mr Leech), and for Redcar (Ian Swales), and my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw (John Mann), who brought to the debate their own experience, either from their private life or from the Committees on which they have served.

A number of Members wanted to take part in the debate, and what their contributions come to, in summation, is the anatomy of a disaster. The Ministry set out to save relatively small amounts of money; I shall explain why I use that phrase. Some Members—certainly Members on the PAC—will have seen the interrogation by the Chair of the PAC, my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Margaret Hodge), of the senior responsible officer, who had not read the report and was not aware of the fact that when a £42 million contract was let to ALS, it was subject to a £1 million limit. He had not read that because he thought that it was de minimis and below his estimable gaze, and things went from bad to worse in that interrogation.

There appears to have been no assessment of the risk in this case. There has been contempt for the way in which professional interpreters should be dealt with. I am very grateful for the way in which professional interpreters have assisted us. I particularly mention Geoffrey Buckingham of the Association of Police and Court Interpreters, but I am also referring to many of the organisations that make up Professional Interpreters for Justice. They have been prepared to brief hon. Members at length on what is going wrong in our courts every day. The only party that appears not to wish to listen to that is the Ministry of Justice, which is why we have had the meltdown in our courts during the past 18 months.

Let me deal first with the issue of costs. I do not expect to get an answer from the Minister on costs, although many hon. Members have asked her about them. I have been trying to get answers to these questions for months through parliamentary questions and Freedom of Information Act inquiries. Let me tell Members what my latest inquiries have gained me. I asked the Ministry to provide the information on wasted costs in courts, and it said that it would not do that, although it could, because it was too expensive. I am appealing that decision, because it seems to me that the Ministry could simply contact each court and ask it to supply that information as raw data, and my office could collate that. Failing that, I asked whether the Ministry would provide me with the e-mail addresses of the country’s courts, so that I could undertake the exercise myself, and it said, wrongly, that that information was available publicly. It is not available publicly, so I am appealing that as well. The fact that the response to one of those inquiries was addressed to Mr Safranov and the other one was unopenable and caused my computer to crash only confirms that the Ministry is either unable or unwilling to provide the information because it knows how devastating it is likely to be.

What we do know—these are in part estimates but also in part statistics—is that about 50% of the requirement for interpreters is being fulfilled through the Capita contract. We know that after 500 days, the alternative system—courts finding their own interpreters—is still in effect. We know that whereas the Ministry claims that from a 58% starting point, Capita’s performance has got better, which is not much of a claim, in fact it got worse again from the middle of last year—it does not acknowledge that. I think that my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton, gave the figures for the trials that have been aborted—more than 600 in the magistrates court and more than 30 in the Crown court over that period.

Those are appalling figures, but it should not be up to any Member of the House to go away and find out that information. That information should be made available, and if the Minister does not have it available, perhaps she could undertake today to give a clear answer about the costs of the failure of the ALS-Capita contract. They include, of course, not only the costs from wasted court time, but the costs from unnecessary remand, the costs to the Crown Prosecution Service and the costs to the Prison Service.

In relation to the impact, I will not read out a great swathe of examples from the dossiers that have been prepared, but they range from the hugely serious to the almost comic. Examples include interpreters who cannot translate the word “guilty”; an attempted murder case in which the interpreter had received no training and did not appreciate the need to translate everything; an interpreter who chatted to witnesses about the case, causing a mistrial after 12 days; and a Crown court trial that was postponed because there was no rare language interpreter, the rare language being Polish—the second most commonly spoken language in the UK. This is going on now.

There was the very serious quadruple murder case at Nottingham Crown court last month. The BBC report stated:

“The failure of an interpreter to show up for a murder suspect’s court appearance has been described as a ‘complete disgrace’ by a judge…No Mandarin interpreter was available, and Nottingham Crown Court heard it was ‘not worthwhile’ for one to turn up”—

according to Capita—

“as they would ‘not make enough money’.”

That was described by the hon. Member for Northampton North (Michael Ellis) as the service being “out of control”. I wonder whether the Minister agrees with her colleague’s view on that matter. A murder case is going on today at Birmingham Crown court for which no Capita interpreter—certainly at the time when I was briefed, early this morning—had turned up, and that case is therefore also in jeopardy.

I do not think that I have to elucidate for Members at this debate how serious these matters are, not just in terms of cost but in terms of the administration and execution of justice. I am not being pompous in saying that these matters go not just to the heart of the Administration, but to the heart of justice itself.

I have with me the translation of an article from Lithuanian, and because it was done by someone on the National Register of Public Service Interpreters, it is certified and I trust it as a translation. It is from a Lithuanian website and is telling people about the interpreting service in this country. It quotes a Lithuanian interpreter in the UK as saying this about dealing with clients:

“We just advise them to tell the truth about how everything happened. For example, how and where they went to steal”.

The most fundamental part of an interpreter’s job is not to interfere in the process of justice—not to do the solicitor’s or the barrister’s job and certainly not to give the client legal advice or advice on how to conduct themselves, yet that appears to be the way in which these matters are routinely conducted.

In the few moments left to me, I would like to deal with where we go next. I do not think that the case against this contract has to be made any further; I think that we have to say, “Where do we go now?”

The MOJ is in a parlous state, in terms of letting contracts; its complete reliance on payment by results; what it is doing with the probation service; and what it is threatening to do with the privatisation of the entire Courts Service. I read in the technical press this week that a £300 million MOJ desktop and laptop support contract has been postponed, reportedly after the four most serious contenders had already spent millions bidding. That is the computer contract for the entire court, prison and probation system, which has been in planning for some years and which has now simply been pulled. We do not know why; perhaps the Minister will tell us. The point is that there is no coherence to the contract letting process in the MOJ and the contract is perhaps the clearest example of it. It is also one of the smallest contracts that it has let, and I fear for what may now happen.

So what should now happen? First, the Government need to stop being in denial about the failure of the contract. They need to stop saying that there has been a dramatic improvement when the situation is getting worse. They need to stop misrepresenting what they say about the view of professional interpreters. In their response to the Select Committee, they claimed that the slight amelioration of conditions was something that had been welcomed. Nothing could be further from the truth, and it is clear in the minutes of the meetings between the Minister, officials and interpreters that the terms being offered do nothing to meet the concerns of the professional interpreters or to adequately compensate them. Until the Minister realises that and begins to address that matter, the contract will continue to fail.

What interpreters want is the reinstatement of the national agreement; proper—not excessive, but fair—remuneration and conditions of service; legislation to protect the title of registered public service interpreter, so that there will no longer be the types of extraordinary cases that we have heard examples of this afternoon; and to work with the Government to establish a regulatory professional body that is robust and rigorous in its approach, enabling interpreters to provide quality interpreting services to public bodies. They do not seem extreme or unreasonable claims or ambitions.

There is a break clause in the contract. The Government could—and should—act now to suspend while they determine how they can properly address the concerns raised. In my opinion, there is now sufficient evidence that the contract with Capita should not continue.

I will stop now, because I want to give the Minister sufficient time to reply to all the points that have been raised. She is a courteous Minister, but she tends to read from her civil servants’ brief, rather than answering the points raised in debate. As we have a full house today and interpreters are present who have come to hear the Government’s current stance, I hope we will hear about some progress and movement towards a fair deal for interpreters, which is important, because they are professional people whose livelihoods are at stake, and that we can have within the courts of England and Wales what we used to take for granted. Certainly when I was in practice, I would take it for granted that interpreters would be competent, efficient, present, and able to discharge their duties.

[Mark Pritchard (in the Chair)]

Minister, as is convention, I intend to call the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith) to make some concluding remarks for two or three minutes, if he wishes to do so, before the end of this debate.