https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15741863/Surge-number-foreign-criminals-sees-cost-court-translators-reach-152-000-day-amid-concern-scams-poor-quality-services.html
19
April 2026
Surge
in number of foreign criminals sees cost of court translators reach
£152,000 a day - amid concern over scams and poor quality services
Soaring
numbers of foreign criminals in Britain’s courts has seen taxpayer
spending on translators soar to as much as £152,000 a day.
The
huge costs come despite a number of scams and scandals involving
interpreters and concern about their effectiveness.
Former Tory
leader, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, on Sunday night urged the
government to cut back the 'unsustainable' costs and branded court
translation services 'woefully poor, expensive and massively open to
fraud'.
In
2024, the total spent on court translators in England and Wales alone
reached £38.6m – up 80pc on the £21.4m spent in 2020.
And
partial data for just the first three quarters of last year indicates
the figure could rise further still.
Between
January and September 2025, £17.7m was spent UK-wide on translators
for the top 10 languages alone, which were mostly Eastern European,
Middle Eastern and South Asian.
In
the whole of the previous year, £16.2m was spent on the top 10
languages.
The
2024 figure represents a 13-fold increase in a little over a decade,
with an average of £11,437 spent a day between 2005 and 2011.
Translators
are called upon to interpret proceedings for defendants, witnesses
and victims whose first language is not English.
Mr
Duncan Smith said: 'These costs are unsustainable and need cutting
back.
'The
government needs to reform the translator service. It is woefully
poor, expensive and massively open to fraud.
'We
should also be worried about the spiralling numbers of recent
migrants who are now being prosecuted for crimes committed in the
UK.'
Last
year, a House of Lords report criticised interpreting services in the
courts as inefficient, ineffective and poses a risk to the
administration of justice.
Peers
highlighted ‘reports of poor-quality interpreting in the courts’
and urged the government to reform the sector 'or risk reinforcing
significant jeopardy to justice for the foreseeable future’.
They
found a ‘clear disconnect between what the government hopes is
happening, what the companies contracted to deliver the services
believe is happening, and what frontline interpreters and legal
professionals report is happening with interpreting services in the
courts’.
In
2021, a fake court interpreter was let off with a suspended
sentence for translating evidence in over 140 cases before being
exposed.
Mirwais
Patang, then 27, worked for contracting giant Capita, despite forging
his qualifications, stealing a legitimate court interpreter's
identify and having a friend pose as him in court.
He
earned at least £65,500 between March 2012 and August 2016.
Issues
with time sheets for a grooming gang trial exposed his lies.
In
another case, a translator who worked for the justice system for 16
years was found in 2019 to be in the pay of a drugs gang.
Kim
Tran, 49, was jailed for 12 months after trying to trick a court into
believing a defendant in a £1m cannabis cultivation case was a child
when she was not.
Separately,
solicitor Babita Attra worked on a scam which saw her partner
Alexandru Major, 35, win contracts to translate legal aid documents
for defendants who could not understand English.
But
the word counts and costs of the work were inflated to cheat the
Legal Aid Agency (LAA) out of at least £62,889.64 between March 2016
and February 2017.
When
they were sentenced in 2020, Major was jailed for three years, while
Attra was given a two year prison term, suspended for two years, with
150 hours unpaid work W
The
huge increases in spending on court translators in England and Wales
between 2020 and 2024 were revealed by a minister in answer to a
parliamentary question by Independent Leicester South MP Shockat
Adam.
The
figures, revealed by Courts and Legal Services Minister Sarah
Sackman, show a total of £155.8m was spent between 2020 and 2024,
averaging £31.16m per year.
A
break down into yearly figures shows how the annual total rocketed
from £21.4 million in 2020 to £27.2 million in 2021, £31.7 million
in 2022, £36.9 million in 2023 and £38.6 million in 2024.
There
were 254 working days in 2024 – a leap year – meaning total
spending that year averaged £151,900 per day.
The
2025 partial figures came from a separate Freedom of Information
request and indicate that the total spending could rise higher still.
The
same FOI data also showed how full-year spending on interpreters for
the top 10 languages alone stood at £16.2m in 2024, £15.9m in 2023,
£14.25m in 2022, £12.55m in 2021 and £10.3m in 2020.
Last
year, the 10 languages which required the highest spending on
translators were Romanian, Polish, Arabic, Albanian, Urdu, Kurdish,
Punjabi, Portuguese, Bengali and Lithuanian.
The
cost of interpreting Albanian in court rocketed from £800,000 in
2020 to £2m in 2024, while there was a similar rise in the cost of
Kurdish translators from £600,000 to £1.6m in the same period.
Polish
and Romanian remained the most interpreted languages throughout the 5
year period, costing the state almost £30m altogether.
In
her answer to Mr Adam, Ms Sackman said four companies were contracted
to provide translation services but that spending also included ‘off
contract’ requirements arising ‘at short notice and those that
are more challenging to fulfil, such as the requirement for languages
that are rare or scarce, and as such are more expensive to source’.
She
pledged new contracts would provide better value for taxpayers,
adding: ‘The next generation of contracts, currently being
procured, includes the use of a secondary supplier of interpreters,
specifically to source those short notice bookings, and to bring this
spend on-contract, with benefits such as improved data and value for
money.’
