14 November 2013
The realities of outsourcing: court
interpreters mean miscarriages of justice
Since
court interpreting has been outsourced, wages have plummeted, quality of
interpreting has dropped to a dangerous level, and the justice system has often
ground to a halt. A foretaste of what to expect from outsourced services across
the country?
Bob
Gould is one of thousands of professional court interpreters who were
effectively thrown out of a job in early 2012 when the entire court
interpreting service for England and Wales was privatised and handed to
“outsourcing solutions” experts, Capita. Rates for interpreters were slashed to
barely subsistence levels overnight, leading to the vast majority of
interpreters choosing to boycott the new contract rather than accept Capita’s
pitiful pay and conditions. As the privatisation of Royal Mail rolls on and
other essential services such as probation and legal aid work look set to fall
under the auctioneer’s hammer, the story of Bob and the thousands of other
interpreters affected is an acrid foretaste of what the government’s
privatisation agenda means for workers and public service users around Britain.
To
the court interpreters, the government’s frequently iterated claims to be
“making work pay” are nothing less than risible. “Before, if you were a capable
interpreter and prepared to work no matter what plans you had for the evening
or what time of night it was, you could earn a good living,” Bob told me. “That
dramatically changed in February 2012, because suddenly there was no court work
for interpreters unless they were prepared to work for this cowboy outfit at
grossly underpaid rates and with no compensation for travel time and fares.
Over 2,000 nationally registered, recognised and experienced interpreters have
been thrown on the scrapheap by the stroke of a pen.” Many interpreters also
accepted night-time and weekend work for the police in addition to their court
work, however a combination of police cuts and the proliferation of
interpreters desperate for work meant that this has dried to a trickle.
Prior
to February 2012 interpreters would be paid a flat rate of £85 for a court
hearing, plus £15 an hour for travel time and reimbursement of the travel fare.
When Capita took over they slashed the rates to £16-22 an hour with no payment
for travelling or waiting time. Bob described what this means in practice for
interpreters. “For example, they might phone up and say, ‘We have a job for an
Italian interpreter in central London. There will be about three hours work
there.’ There might be, or there might not be, but it will take you an hour to
get there from the suburbs, it will cost you £6 to get there and back, and when
you get there you might only have an hour’s work.”
In
this case, the interpreter could take home just £10 for three hours of their
working day after travel expenses are deducted. Bob estimates that interpreters
now earn between 25 and 40 percent of their previous rate for a court hearing.
“If you’re only there for one hour, less your fare, less your national
insurance, less your tax – forget it; it’s a waste of time.” In one particularly extreme example, a Vietnamese
interpreter traveled from Newcastle to Sussex – a 560 mile round trip – only
for the hearing to be adjourned after eight minutes.
The
impact that these changes have had on court proceedings is also concerning.
“Normally you would get there early because you need to be available for a
conference before the hearing starts – a discussion in private with the lawyer
and the client. Now you won’t be paid for that, so what happens is people turn
up at 10am when the court starts, not at 9.30am when the conference starts. The
lawyer will say to the court, ‘I haven’t had a chance to discuss things with my
client because the interpreter wasn’t there,’ and the judge will say ‘All
right, we’ll adjourn it for now and you can go down and talk to your client.’”
That’s
if the interpreter shows up at court at all. In the first year of the contract
over 600 trials were abandoned due to Capita failing to provide an adequate
interpreter, and Capita also received 6,417 complaints about the standard of
the service they were providing – over 25 per working day! Bob describes their
approach to interpreting as “like selling cabbages: pile ‘em high, sell ’em
cheap, and you make more money. But interpreters are not cabbages. You need to
be able to stand up to questioning in court. You need to be able to instantly
interpret accurately for a long period of time. You need to understand the
subtleties and the cultural and linguistic differences between the foreign
language and the English language.”
The
changes in pay and conditions have led to an exodus of experienced and
qualified interpreters from the courts. Bob told me that many of his former
colleagues have returned to their country of origin, no longer able to afford
life in Britain, while others have turned to walking dogs, babysitting and
cleaning in order to pay the bills. Others have found part-time teaching or
written translation work, but at a fraction of their former salary.
As
a result of this refusal to accept their terms, Capita have been forced to
employ people with no experience of interpreting, let alone of working in a
high-pressured court environment. A survey of Capita interpreters conducted by
Involvis found that 44.5% had not been asked to undergo any kind of assessment
of their interpreting skills before being offered jobs by Capita. In one of the
more farcical episodes of this mostly tragic saga one interpreter managed to register her pet rabbit as an interpreter with
Applied Language Solutions (the company that was granted the initial contract
before being taken over by Capita).
This
use of inexperienced interpreters with little experience of working in a legal
environment means that the most basic errors can cause severe disruption to the
proceedings. Bob described how unqualified French interpreters can very easily
translate the word ‘caution’ as une caution, meaning a deposit or
security payment, when in fact the correct equivalent is une mise en garde.
“How can the important message in this caution have been communicated when the
question put to them is, ‘Have you understood the deposit?’ This is an
important procedure. It’s your right not to say anything so it’s important to
impart that to the person.” There have also been cases of defendants being told
by their interpreters that they will have to pay a fee, when in fact they are being
told that they face charges. If picked up on, these kinds of mistakes can lead
to re-trials with the attendant psychological and financial consequences for
all involved. If not picked up on, they can lead to miscarriages of justice. “I
hear it already. I hear of mistakes being made. There will be a gross
miscarriage of justice on the basis of very poor interpreting,”
To
get a sense of the scale of the turmoil Capita has caused in the courts it is
only necessary to visit the Linguist Lounge website, which collates the
hundreds of Twitter reports from lawyers and court staff of Capita interpreters
failing to show up or providing an inadequate service. A series of tweets from
Mary Prior, a barrister at 36 Bedford Row chambers, gives a snapshot of how the
justice system is being affected by the changes. On 30th July 2013 she tweeted,
“No Hungarian interpreter. Waiting to start a trial. Can’t start until co-defendant
has their interpreter.” Over three hours later she then tweeted, “Hungarian
interpreter has now arrived. As a result trial will go well into next week and
jurors may not be available to sit,” and then, “The difference in quality
between a proper interpreter and these new court ones is staggering. Please
make it stop.” This is just one case among hundreds, each of which is costing
the Ministry of Justice many thousands of pounds in additional court
administration costs.
Although
the privatisation of court interpreting is a particularly egregious example,
Bob was clear about the parallels with other public services facing or already
undergoing privatisation. “It’s a familiar pattern of big firms that have no
expertise in that particular area taking huge responsibilities on at a huge
multi-million pound price and making massive profits by dropping the services
and giving their employees poor pay and conditions. That’s the way it’s going
and it’s going that way more and more.”
No comments:
Post a Comment