2
April 2014
Translation
Services
Justice
Mark
Hendrick
(Preston, Labour)
To
ask the Secretary of State for Justice how much HM Courts and Tribunal Service
spent on interpreters in 2011, 2012 and 2013; how much was spent on
interpreting each language in those years; and how much was paid by defendants
towards these costs.
Shailesh Vara (The Parliamentary
Under-Secretary of State for Justice; North West Cambridgeshire, Conservative)
The
Department does not hold centrally all of the information that the hon. Member
has requested. Although we cannot provide all the data on spend for the periods
requested we can provide the annual spend for interpreters sourced through the
Capita-TI Contract for Her Majesty's Courts and Tribunal Service as follows:
Calendar
year
|
Total
(£)
|
2012
|
7,940,128.79
|
2013
|
15,537,821.29
|
Off
contract bookings made by HMCTS are outside of these spend figures. The number
of bookings made off contract has substantially decreased since the start of
2012 with those bookings moving onto the Capita TI contract. This move from off
contract to Capita TI is reflected in the changing year on year contract spend.
Spend
for 2012 is based on an 11 month period as the contract did not go live until
30 January 2012. Expenditure has also increased in the second year of contract
due to changes made to the contract in May 2013 and an estimated 20% increase
on volume. £15 million was saved in year one of the contract.
In
this instance to provide the requested information on total annual spend and
spend by language, would exceed the disproportionate cost threshold of £850.00
or 4½ working days.
In
order to provide the information we would be required to obtain a number of
large reports from electronic databases. The relevant data must then be
manually extracted and collated. It would also require comparison against
additional financial data before analysis. We estimate that this process for
the spend data would take approximately six working days given the volume of
data involved.
Defendants
in criminal cases do not contribute towards the costs of interpreters that are
provided by HMCTS. Charges for HMCTS provided interpreters in civil, family and
tribunal cases are not passed directly to parties, although the costs may be
recovered from court and tribunal fees in the jurisdictions where they apply.
No comments:
Post a Comment