PQ: 6 May 2025

https://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2025-04-22.HL6716.h

Courts: Interpreters

Ministry of Justice written question – answered at on 6 May 2025.

Lord Laming Chair, Accommodation Steering Group Committee

To ask His Majesty's Government what progress they are making in improving the efficiency of handling complaints about the use of interpreters in the courts system.

Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Justice, Lord in Waiting (HM Household) (Whip)

We have a complaints process that manages complaints about the interpreting service, complaints about specific interpreters, and complaints by interpreters. We are always looking to improve the efficiency of our processes. The Public Services Committee (PSC) of the House of Lords published a report into interpreting in the courts on 24 March 2025, and we are currently reviewing its recommendations about complaints. We will respond to the PSC’s report in due course.

 

https://www.theyworkforyou.com/lords/?id=2025-05-06a.1456.1

Artificial Intelligence: Public Services - Question

– in the House of Lords at 2:58 pm on 6 May 2025.

[…] Baroness Coussins Crossbench

My Lords, does the Minister agree that caution is needed if public services, in an attempt to be inclusive but also to save money, convey information in languages other than English that has been produced by machine translation? That works pretty well for standard Romance languages and for German, but it is much less effective for languages with many dialects, such as Arabic, and it is currently virtually useless for Asian or African languages because they have not been used in AI training data. Is all this being fed into emerging AI policy and prospective regulation?

Lord Vallance of Balham Minister of State (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology)

I thank the noble Baroness. This is an incredibly important point. As the noble Baroness rightly says, the AI training datasets are often not on the right things, and this is an example where there is a need for training of models in different languages and dialects. It will be very important as part of public service improvements. I thank the noble Baroness for raising this issue—and yes, it is something that is being looked at. […]