20
July 2012 by Owen Bowcott
MPs to investigate 'underperforming' firm awarded £300m court monopoly
Private
interpreting contractor ALS faces investigation after cancelled court cases and
complaints from judges and lawyers
The way
in which a private contractor was awarded a £300m monopoly of court
interpreting services throughout England and Wales and the firm's
"underperformance" are to be investigated by MPs.
The House
of Commons justice select committee has called for evidence about difficulties
that have emerged since Applied Language Solutions (ALS), an Oldham-based
company, took over responsibility for the work in February.
ALS was
acquired by the public-service provider Capita after winning the contract but
there have been complaints from lawyers, magistrates and
judges about the service. The National Audit Office also said it was
"looking into the matter" following requests from parliament's
influential public accounts committee.
Court
cases have repeatedly been cancelled, while hundreds of professional interpreters
have boycotted the new contract because they refuse to work for reduced rates
and lower travel expenses. In one case, it was said, a court had to resort to
Google's online computer translation because no Lithuanian interpreter could be
found.
A murder
trial was halted for a day at Winchester crown court this month after an
unqualified interpreter could not accurately translate questions from a
barrister. The man arrived 45 minutes late and concerns were raised that he was
not translating questions into Punjabi properly for a key witness. He later
revealed that his wife – the interpreter supplied by ALS – was busy and he was
filling in for her. He said he had taken the ALS interpreter test but not
received his results. A second ALS interpreter had problems translating in the
same trial the following week. ALS declined to comment on individual incidents.
Emily
Thornberry, the shadow attorney general, has urged her opposite number, Dominic
Grieve, to take contempt of court proceedings over the "failures of
Applied Language Solutions to supply well-trained interpreters in a timely
fashion to our courts".
In a
House of Lords debate this month, the justice minister, Lord McNally, admitted
the £12m savings envisaged were unlikely to be found this year. The firm, he
conceded, had made "a very poor start" but insisted there had since
been significant improvements.
Lady
Butler-Sloss, a retired judge, asked 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, in Birmingham and in Leeds?"
The
justice select committee's concerns reflect heightened political anxieties
about contracting out vital services to private firms, exemplified by G4S's Olympic failures.
The
select committee's inquiry will be focused on six areas, including "the
rationale for changing arrangements for the provision of interpreter services;
the nature and appropriateness of the procurement process; and the steps taken
to rectify underperformance and the extent to which they have been
effective". It has asked for written evidence to be submitted by 3
September.
The
founder of ALS, Gavin Wheeldon, an entrepreneur who has said he prefers
Porsches to Ferraris, recently left the company "to pursue other
interests", according to Capita.
Responding
to the inquiry, a spokeswoman for Capita said ALS had not been called before
the justice select committee. She said: "The Ministry of Justice [MoJ]
awarded the contract to ALS to address the weaknesses, lack of transparency and
disproportionate costs of the previous service.
"The
recent release of the statistics from the MoJ concerning the contract show an
improvement month on month in fulfilling requests for interpretation services
(nearly 3,000 bookings a week) rising from 65% in the first month of the
contract to more than 90% in April.
"This
performance is continuing to improve. We are determined to get the service
running at full efficiency, providing transparency of opportunity for linguists
and fully supporting the MoJ, police and court service. The overall objective
remains to work in partnership with the MoJ to ensure that a more efficient and
effective service is in place than previous arrangements." ALS has in the
past confirmed that the original MoJ tender document valued the five-year contract
at £300m.
An MoJ
spokesperson said: "There were an unacceptable number of problems at the
start of the new contract in January but we have now seen a significant
improvement in performance. We continue to work with the contractor to bring
performance to the required level."
Interpreters
for Justice, a campaign begun by the Association of Police and Court
Interpreters (APCI) and the Society for Public Service Interpreting (SPSI) to
oppose the new contract, welcomed the inquirytheinquiries by the select
committee and the NAO.
Geoffrey
Buckingham, chairman of APCI, said: "This outsourced contract bears all
the same hallmarks as the outsourced contract for [Olympic] security hitting
the headlines currently. ALS/Capita is consistently failing to meet the terms
of its £75m annual contract agreement, which the professional interpreter
bodies have refused to be a part of from the start. They can't recruit in
sufficient numbers, the quality isn't there and there's poor management and
accountability."
Guillermo
Makin, chairman of SPSI, said: "Professionally qualified and experienced
interpreters have valiantly upheld their ethical principles by not signing up
for a system which cannot be sustained and which is degrading British justice
and breaking the law on a person's right to a fair trial. We have a dossier of
evidence which we will be providing to the justice select committee in response
to their inquiry."
In May,
the MoJ released figures showing there had been 2,232 complaints about language
services in court since the beginning of the year.
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