18 September 2014
Lost in
translation: it’s time that outsourcers were brought to justice
[…] But
here’s one issue and it relates to most of our most strategically important
companies, given outsourcing’s role in essential services: Capita.
Deep
within a 70-page policy paper to be put before the Liberal Democrat
conference next month is a call for the party to “undertake an urgent review of
procurement within the Ministry of Justice with the aim of improving the
process of procurement, the nature of suppliers selected, and the structure of
the contracts”.
Senior
grass-root Lib Dems note that the Justice Select Committee, which is chaired by
the party grandee Sir Alan Beith, was “scathing” about a number of contracts,
in particular one involving the provision of court interpreters.
The
paper argues that under the contractor, Capita, the interpreters “appear to be
costing more money and yet [have] reduced service delivery to an unacceptably
low level”. For example, the cost of hiring translators to help
non-English speakers at crown or magistrate courts nearly doubled from £7.9m in
2012 to £15.5m a year later.
Post-outsourcing
fiascos included the bizarre instance of an “interpreter” at a murder trial in
Winchester, who admitted he was standing in for his wife after a fair few linguistic
blunders. Ministry of Justice procurement is a “car crash”, grumbles a Lib Dem
lawyer.
Payments
totalling a little more than £46,000 were withheld from Capita’s translation
and interpreting arm between May 2012 and November 2013 – a tame penalty for a
series of serious failures on a contract that was supposed to save the taxpayer
£18m a year.
The
Lib Dems blame many of the Ministry of Justice’s procurement problems – which
also include Serco and G4S charging fees for tagging non-existent offenders –
on the Conservatives and also the civil servants who oversaw botched contract
negotiations under the last Labour government. But in coalition, the party has
always had a minister in the department and they can’t escape a degree of
culpability. If passed, an urgent review would become party policy, but would
not necessarily be included in the manifesto.
Even
if it does, let’s hope that the current Lib Dem justice minister, Simon Hughes,
presses for that review to get started now. It would be wrong to save this as
an election pledge on the off-chance that lightning will strike twice – in a
row – and the party gets another shot at power-sharing.
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