12 July 2012 by Anna Aslanyan
Cost
savings on court interpreting services are anything but
Professional
interpreters are boycotting courts because of new pay arrangements.
Whenever I am
woken up on Saturday morning by a phone call, I know yet another blow has been
dealt to British taxpayers. For it's almost certainly a magistrates' court
requesting an interpreter to replace a no-show. If you missed the (surprisingly
few) headlines dedicated to the recent confusion in courts, here is the story
so far.
Until this year,
courts used to book registered public service interpreters directly. On 1
February 2012, a new agreement was put in place, supposedly to make the system
more efficient. The contract privatising court interpreting services in England
and Wales was won by Applied Language Solutions (ALS), owned by the outsourcing
firm Capita, which has promised to cut the annual £60m interpreting bill by 20
per cent. This figure, £12m per year, however attractive in the current
climate, has two flaws: no one can see how it was derived, nor how it can be
achieved.
Geoffrey
Buckingham, the chairman of the Association of Police and Court Interpreters
(APCI), said of ALS' target: “We first heard about it in September 2010, in a
meeting with the MoJ. It was given as a ballpark figure, based on nothing solid
and arrived at without any consultation.” APCI presented a number of documents
to the MoJ, indicating that the spending is likely to increase as a result of
outsourcing. This prediction turned out to be correct. Keeping people in
custody while hearings are delayed costs money, as do appeals caused by poor
interpreting. Buckingham also spoke of “the weekly humiliation of the criminal
justice system”, referring to a number of cases adjourned because of
interpreters' unprofessionalism. That's before you start counting the human
costs of what appears to be a classical example of privatisation gone wrong.
It's not only
the opponents of the Framework Agreement that point out its downsides – the MoJ
now admits the savings may not be as great. Justice Minister Lord McNally said
ALS had made “a very poor start to this contract” and that “some of the
original estimates of a £12m saving in this first year will probably not be
achieved.” Baroness Coussins, an independent cross-bench peer, was sceptical
about the data supplied by ALS: “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.” Indeed, it's hard to see how the MoJ can
effectively monitor the quality of these services. Working for courts, I often
wondered if anyone could give me any post-assignment feedback and once asked a
clerk to fill in an improvised form; he was unable to write more than “was of
assistance to judge.” Proper assessment would be too costly, whereas a
certificate issued by an independent body is at least some guarantee that the
person sitting in the dock is not going to call the defendant, accused of
perverting the course of justice, a pervert.
The chaos in courtrooms
was initially put down to “teething troubles”. An MoJ spokesperson admitted:
“There have been an unacceptable number of problems in the first weeks of the
contract” – thanks to incompetent interpreters who have failed to turn up on
some occasions and made irreparable mistakes on others. When a Romanian
interpreter mispronounced a defendant's statement, saying “bitten” instead of
“beaten”, a retrial had to be ordered at Snaresbrook Crown Court, after the
error was admitted. This four-day case is estimated to cost taxpayers £25,000;
another one, in Leicester, which collapsed after three weeks for a similar
reason, will be even more expensive. That ALS uses unqualified “linguists” is
no secret; to prove this, a frustrated professional successfully registered her
dead pet with the company.
Previously
interpreters received a flat fee of £85, a lower quarter-hourly rate after
three hours and were paid for travel time and expenses. This has been replaced
by an hourly rate of £16, often with no travel reimbursement. No wonder the
majority of professional interpreters are boycotting the ALS contract. Their
protest outside the Houses of Parliament in April was strong but fruitless;
still, Interpreters for Justice campaign continues. To keep the MoJ under
pressure, activists go on writing to their MPs, signing petitions and reporting
substandard cases online. Yelena McCafferty, an experienced court interpreter,
said on behalf of her colleagues: “We feel the new principles are both unfair
and completely unworkable from the practical point of view. Many interpreters
have left the profession to try their skills elsewhere.” Asked about the MoJ's
response, she added: “Not only are they failing to monitor the performance
delivered – or undelivered – by ALS, they are also turning a blind eye to
everything we have exposed in the media and on our campaign website.”
APCI submitted
their own proposal aimed at improving court interpreting services nearly two
years ago, but got no answer from the MoJ. The ministry seems to be less
interested in cost reduction than Cambridgeshire Constabulary, which shashed
their interpreting expenses via better management rather than payment cuts.
“The Framework Agreement is dying a painful death,” said Buckingham. “I think
it should be put to sleep.”
Let's hope
someone is going to listen to the voice of reason. This would mean less
disruption in courts, and in my home at weekends.
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