Courts: Translation Services
Ministry of Justice written
question – answered on 4th July 2019.
Yasmin Qureshi Shadow Minister (Justice)
To ask the Secretary of
State for Justice, what estimate he has made of the (a) number of court cases
rescheduled due to problems with interpreting or translating services and (b)
additional cost incurred from that rescheduling in each of the last three
years.
Paul Maynard The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice
The Ministry does not hold
central data for all jurisdictions and hearing types in which interpreters are
used and to manually review each case would incur disproportionate costs.
However, central information does exist on the number of trials listed in the
criminal courts which were adjourned as a result of interpreters being
unavailable. This data is published in Criminal Court Statistics.
A table detailing such
occurrences over the last three years for which data is available is copied
below.
| Crown Courts | Magistrates’ Courts | |||||
| Year | Number of trials | Adjourned due to interpreter availability | % of trials adjourned due to interpreter availability | Number of trials | Adjourned due to interpreter availability | % of trials adjourned due to interpreter availability |
| 2016 | 37,339 | 30 | 0.1% | 149,423 | 495 | 0.3% |
| 2017 | 34,579 | 29 | 0.1% | 136,962 | 423 | 0.3% |
| 2018 | 29,583 | 17 | 0.1% | 123,023 | 495 | 0.4% |
As the associated costs for
HMCTS of rescheduling trial cases will vary, depending on whether other
work was able to be heard in that courtroom, this information is not held
centrally.
The department continues to
monitor its language service contracts closely and work with the suppliers to
drive improvements and reduce the cost on the taxpayer. The Language Service
contract has achieved a fulfilment rate of 97% over the first quarter of 2019.
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