12 September 2012 by Catherine Baksi
Spending watchdog trains fire on interpreter
contracting chaos
The Ministry of Justice has come under fire from public spending watchdogs
for awarding a £90m contract for court interpreters to a company that lacked
the ability to deliver it.
In a damning report on the outsourcing of language services in the
justice system to Applied Language Solutions, the National Audit Office (NAO)
declares that the MoJ ’s due diligence on the successful bid 'was not thorough
enough'.
ALS was a small company and the volume of work the ministry wanted to
give to it was large, the report notes. Yet a report the ministry itself
commissioned from a financial data company indicated that Applied should only
be given contracts worth up to £1m.
The contract with Applied for the provision of court interpreters is
worth an estimated £90m over five years.
The NAO says: ‘The ministry considered the financial report but did not
see it as a barrier to the award of the contract. It told us that this was
because it considered [Applied] to be only a managing agent for interpreters,
who themselves remained freelance sole traders.’
On the rationale for the new contract, the public spending watchdog says
that the MoJ had strong reasons for changing the old system, which it said was
‘inadequate in several respects’.
However, in accepting Applied’s assertion that it would be able to
increase the number of interpreters working in the justice system, the MoJ ‘did
not give sufficient weight to the concerns and dissatisfaction that many
interpreters expressed’ with Applied.
The report criticises the department for both failing to analyse the
number of interpreters likely to be available and willing to work with Applied,
and for not modelling the cut in income that public sector interpreters could
expect.
On implementation, the NAO says the MoJ ‘underestimated the project
risks’ when it decided to switch from a regional to a national rollout and
‘allowed the contract to become fully operational before it was ready’.
It also points out there were ‘other important contractual obligations’
with which Applied did not comply and to which Applied failed to alert the MoJ.
The contract started on 30 January and ‘immediately faced operational
difficulties’.
The report adds: ‘Initially [Applied’s] performance was wholly
inadequate, leading to missed performance targets and around a fifth of the
interpretation work in courts and tribunals being done under old arrangements.’
Trials and legal procedures were disrupted. Some 182 magistrates’ court
trials were recorded as ineffective because of interpreter availability issues
– almost double the number recorded for the same period last year (95 were
recorded in the first quarter of 2011).
The NAO found that Applied’s systems were not ‘sufficiently mature’ to
cope with demand and that it did not have enough staff to deal with bookings
and complaints. Some calls from court services were routed to the company’s
Indian call centre, contrary to the terms of the contract. On the control
environment, the NAO points out that the MoJ has rights to inspect Applied, but
‘has been slow to do so’.
The MoJ also had the right to penalise Applied for its poor performance,
by withholding a proportion of payments according to a formula. Yet it elected
not to do so between January and April, foregoing an estimated £11,000.
The MoJ has subsequently applied penalty payments and told the NAO that
its decision not to do so previously was ‘a commercial one, taken in light of
the investment in making the contract work by Capita, which acquired Applied a
few weeks after it won the MoJ contract’.
Under the new arrangements, the MoJ estimated that its organisations and
police forces could together save £18m a year in payments to interpreters, but
the NAO says it is too soon to determine whether the contract will provide
value for money.
Among other things, the watchdog calls on the MoJ, with Capita, to
complete checks to ensure all interpreters working on the contract have
appropriate qualifications and criminal records clearance. Today’s report
followed an investigation into the new contract after it had received
correspondence from ‘a number of individuals, including MPs, whistleblowers and
the public’, asking it to look into what had happened.
The Gazette was the first to expose teething
problems with the contract back in February. The Justice Committee is also
scrutinising the Applied contract; its call for written evidence ended last
week.
Commenting on the NAO’s findings, chair of the Commons public accounts
committee Margaret Hodge MP said: ‘It is appalling that the ministry awarded
[Applied] a £90m contract to provide a service essential to ensuring the proper
administration of justice that was clearly beyond this company’s ability to
deliver.’
She said Applied’s ‘unacceptably poor performance’, which saw it supply
an interpreter in only 58% of hearings in February, and at times interpreters
who were ‘inexcusably bad’, led to ‘courtroom chaos’.
‘It forced court staff to interrupt their core duties to find
interpreters at short notice and triggered a steep rise in the number of
abandoned trials,’ she added.
‘My concern is that the resulting delays and hearing cancellations
caused distress for victims, defendants and witnesses, additional costs to the
taxpayer and damage to the reputation of the justice system.’
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