9 July 2012
£12m
interpreter savings 'unlikely'
A new contract for providing interpreters in courts is unlikely to meet
an expected £12 million saving in its first year, the Government has admitted.
The national scheme, run by Applied Language Solutions (ALS), has been
plagued by reports of cases being delayed or abandoned as a result of
translators failing to turn up or making mistakes.
Justice minister Lord McNally said ALS had made "a very poor start
to this contract" but there had since been big improvements.
Labour's Lord Harrison asked at question time in the House of Lords
whether the Government would revise down the "original £12 million
estimate" of cost savings.
Lord McNally replied: "I presume that some of the original
estimates of a £12 million saving in this first year will probably not be
achieved - that makes common sense - but this isn't a solution just for this
year but a long-term solution which we hope, once it is bedded down, will give
the service and quality required."
Baroness Coussins, an independent crossbench peer and vice president of
the Chartered Institute of Linguists, said she understood the company was
"supplying performance data to the Government which suggests they are dong
a good job".
But she added: "These figures come without any independent
verification or audit and they tell a very different story from the complaints
we are hearing daily from judges and others about the failure to provide
interpreters or the sending of unqualified, inexperienced people with no
experience of simultaneous interpreting and some who are simply incompetent, in
one case not understanding the difference between murder and
manslaughter."
And retired senior judge Baroness Butler-Sloss, a crossbencher, asked
Lord McNally: "Are you aware of the extent of disruption and delay to
criminal trials as a result of serious inaccuracies of court interpreting which
is not only leading to very considerable cost but also concerns have been
raised by judges across the country, particularly in London, in Birmingham and
in Leeds?"
Lord McNally said the Ministry of Justice had a "massive interest
in making sure Applied Language Solutions provides the quality of service for
which it is contracted".
He added: "There has been improvement and we are talking about a
system where there are some 800 requests a day for such interpretation - in the
first quarter of its operation some 26,000 requests in 142 languages. One has
got to get complaints about performance into perspective."
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