14 December 2012
Public Accounts Committee publishes report on the Ministry of Justice's language service contract
The Rt Hon Margaret Hodge
MP, Chair of the Committee of Public Accounts, today said:
"Interpretation services
are vital for ensuring fair access to justice. Yet when the Ministry of Justice
set out to establish a new centralised system for supplying interpreters to the
justice system, almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
The Ministry awarded the
contract to a company, ALS, that was clearly incapable of delivering. The
Ministry had been warned that ALS was too small to shoulder a contract worth
more than £1 million, but went ahead and handed them an annual £42 million
contract covering the whole country.
The Ministry did not
understand its own basic requirements, such as how many interpreters it needed
or in what languages.
And it ignored the views of
interpreters, who were clear that they had serious concerns about the contract
and were adamant that they would not work for ALS.
Capita took over ALS in
late 2011. They had no hope of recruiting enough qualified interpreters in time
to start the service. The Ministry needed access to 1,200 interpreters when the
contract went live; the company had only 280 properly assessed interpreters
willing to work for it.
Matters became even worse
when the Ministry decided that the new service would go live nationally in one
go. Many of the ‘interpreters’ it thought were available had simply registered
an interest on the company’s website and had been subject to no official checks
that they had the required skills and experience. Indeed, we heard that some
names were fictitious and one person had even successfully registered their pet
dog.
As a result, the company
was able to meet only 58% of bookings against a target of 98%.
The result was total
chaos. Court officials have had to scramble to find qualified
interpreters at short notice; there has been a sharp rise in delayed, postponed
and abandoned trials; individuals have been kept on remand solely because no
interpreter was available; and the quality of interpreters has at times been
appalling.
Despite this, the Ministry
has only penalized the supplier a risible £2,200. This is an object-lesson in
how not to contract out a public service."
Margaret Hodge was speaking
as the Committee published its 21st Report of this Session which, on the basis
of evidence from the Ministry of Justice, Capita and the Association of Police
and Court Interpreters, examined the Ministry of Justice’s language service
contract.
When participants in the
justice system do not speak English as their first language, it is essential
for justice that they are provided with interpretation services. The Ministry
of Justice (the Ministry) provides translators and interpreters to defendants
at particular stages of the justice process. Before January 2012, the Ministry
generally booked interpretation services directly with individual interpreters,
many of whom were listed on the National Register of Public Service
Interpreters (NRPSI). This approach was administratively inefficient; for
example, individual Courts booked and paid interpreters separately. The
Ministry decided to set up a new centralised system for procuring language
services intending the new system to be better quality, cheaper and more
efficient.
In August 2011, the
Ministry signed a four year Framework Agreement for language services with
Applied Language Solutions (ALS), under which all justice sector bodies could
enter contracts with ALS. It expected the Framework Agreement to be worth up to
£42 million a year. In October 2011, the Ministry signed a five year contract
under the Framework Agreement which went live nationally on 30 January 2012.
The Ministry expected the contract to cost £18 million a year. In December
2011, after the Ministry had signed its contract with ALS, ALS was acquired by
Capita.
The Ministry was not an
intelligent customer in procuring language services, despite the risks posed to
the administration of justice and to the Ministry’s reputation. It is not clear
how consultations with interpreters in late 2009 fed into the process after the
2010 General Election. In one consultation, held in Cardiff in 2009, there were
no more than 20 attendees and the question of who assessed interpreters was
raised but there was no feedback. Yet this was one of the issues that caused
problems with the contract when it was let. The Ministry started the process
without basic management information on language services, including the cost
of interpreters or what languages were required in which locations and at what
notice. Its use of a competitive dialogue process meant that it selected a
single national provider rather than using a number of regional providers which
could have had a better chance of meeting demand.
The Ministry failed to
undertake proper due diligence on ALS's winning bid. It did not heed financial
and other advice that ALS was too small and would struggle to scale up to meet
the Ministry’s requirements in time. The Ministry also ignored strong
opposition from the interpreter community. Interpretation is a specialised
service. The procurement and later implementation might have been more
effective had the strongly held views expressed by experienced interpreters and
trade bodies during the Ministry’s consultation been given greater weight. The
contract did not include a strong enough incentive for ALS to meet the
requirements of the contract right from the start. ALS was acquired by Capita
just before the contract started.
The Ministry went live with
the contract when Capita-ALS had only 280 interpreters, available to work under
the contract, compared to the 1,200 that the Ministry estimated were required.
Capita-ALS struggled to recruit interpreters and make them available. As a
result, Capita-ALS used interpreters who had not been properly assessed
as required by the contract and this impacted on the quality of service and the
quality of justice in the courts The Ministry did not conduct a proper pilot or
a phased roll-out to ensure a smooth transition.
When the contract went
live, Capita-ALS only met 58% of bookings and there was a sharp rise in the
number of ineffective trials due to problems with interpreters. Postponing
proceedings and delays which resulted in individuals being held in custody for
longer periods creates an unnecessary extra cost to the Ministry. The Ministry
was unable to quantify the additional cost to them of the failure. However
Capita has only been fined £2,200 to date for failing to meet the terms of the
contract.
Capita-ALS is now
fulfilling more bookings, but it is still struggling to fulfil all and we are
concerned that it may not be doing enough to recruit interpreters or to
incentivise interpreters to take jobs in rare languages and covering all
geographical locations. The Ministry cannot be sure that all interpreters
working under the contract have the required skills, experience and character,
partly because it is not yet inspecting Capita-ALS as it has the right to do
under the contract. Too many courts are having to find their own interpreters
which means that the purpose of the policy, to provide one centralised system,
has not been met.
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