Jul 11 2012
Government admits
controversial ALS interpreter contract will not save £12m
The Government has admitted a controversial scheme
to provide interpreters to the courts and West Midlands Police is unlikely to
save £12 million.
The national cost-cutting scheme, run by Applied
Language Solutions (ALS), has been plagued by reports of translators failing to
turn up or making mistakes.
The Mail revealed in March that foreign crime
suspects had been allowed to walk free from police custody before questioning
because of huge shortages.
The West Midlands force signed up to the Ministry
of Justice-backed agency last November in a bid to slash £750,000 from its
annual bill of nearly £2 million. But officers had to ship in linguists from as
far afield as Leeds and Manchester to meet the shortages.
Justice
minister Lord McNally said ALS had made “a very poor start to this contract”
but there had since been big improvements.
He added: “I presume some of the original estimates
of a £12 million saving in this first year will probably not be achieved. “But
this isn’t a solution just for this year but a long-term solution.”
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,
Birmingham and Leeds?”
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 doing a good job”. 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.”
Lord McNally said the Ministry of Justice had a
“massive interest in making sure ALS 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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