BBC Radio 4 - Court interpreting - 04/04/13

Listen to an interview with Liese Katschinka (EULITA) on BBC Radio Four on 04/04/13, where she talks about EU Directive 2010/64:
https://soundcloud.com/interpreter/40413sixoclocknews

Court interpreting service misses 98% target

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22030779 
4 April 2013 
Court interpreting service misses 98% target 
The company running the privatised court interpreter service in England and Wales has missed targets in its first year, figures show. 
Private contractor Capita aims to meet 98% of interpreter requests but has not achieved that figure since it took over the contract on 30 January 2012.
Its overall success rate in the first year was 90%, peaking at 95% in July. 
But the government says there has been a "dramatic improvement" in the service since Capita's contract began. 
The figures, released by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) also show there have been 6,417 complaints and more than 600 court trials abandoned due to a lack of interpreters over the last 12 months.  
Capita achieved a 66% success rate in its first month - February 2012 - and that climbed to a high in July before declining each month after that to reach 86% in January. 
The news comes just weeks before the government starts a consultation exercise on out-sourcing criminal legal aid - a budget worth £2bn a year. 
In February of this year the Commons Justice Select Committee said the Ministry's handling of the contract had been "shambolic".
 In 2011, the MoJ outsourced interpretation work to private firm Applied Language Solutions (ALS) in a bid to save £18m a year.
ALS was sold to Capita, an outsourcing and recruitment company, before the contract began, and is now run as Capita Translation and Interpreting.
Courts Minister Helen Grant said: "There has been a dramatic improvement in the interpreter contract since the initial problems at the start of last year, with the vast majority of bookings now being completed and a major reduction in complaints.
"Our changes have saved taxpayers £15m this year." 
An MoJ spokesperson said: "We are aware performance dipped very slightly this January when changes were made to interpreters' travel allowances and we are taking steps with the contractor to address this and drive further improvement."

Ursula Brennan, Permanent Secretary at the MoJ, is interviewed about the HMCTS Framework Agreement

http://www.civilserviceworld.com/interview-ursula-brennan/ 
4 April, 2013

Ursula Brennan, Permanent Secretary at the MoJ, is interviewed about the HMCTS Framework Agreement:

This brings us to the MoJ’s last substantial outsourcing project: the commissioning of a private company to manage the provision of interpreters in law courts. The National Audit Office, the Justice Select Committee, and the Public Accounts Committee have all published highly critical reports on the interpreters scheme, with the Justice Committee chair Alan Beith condemning it as “shambolic” (see CSW 20 February). Here, Brennan is uncomfortable again: “It’s a really good example of how difficult it is to get across the story about something that isn’t necessarily straightforward,” she says, with an awkward laugh.

The service was in urgent need of reform, she argues: courts were commissioning interpreters “locally, without a lot of obviously-enforced quality standards. We started with something that wasn’t a good place to be, and said: ‘We need quality standards; we need consistent understanding of our costs; and we need to make sure we’re not paying over the odds’.”

The MoJ’s solution was to commission the private company ALS to provide a single portal through which all courts would hire interpreters. Cheaper, less qualified interpreters would be used in less sensitive cases, and the payment system was changed so that, for example, interpreters wouldn’t be paid for the time spent waiting for their cases to come up.

The department also decided that it would get the new scheme in place to an ambitious timetable: “Interpreters were going to get less money, and they understandably were really opposed to the changes we were going to make, so the people here had to make a judgement about how swiftly we flipped over to the new regime,” Brennan explains. “The longer we carried on debating and discussing, the more the interpreters thought: ‘The MoJ will probably change its mind and not make these changes.’ So we needed to move reasonably swiftly.”

Not surprisingly, the MoJ’s relationship with its freelance linguists quickly deteriorated, and they mounted a boycott of the new system which meant that, as Brennan acknowledges, “the first months of the new system were a real problem. There were places where it was difficult to get interpreters in court, they didn’t turn up on time, and so on”. Brennan argues that the new system has now settled in. “If you ask staff in courts now, they say the portal is much better than it was before,” she says. “That contract is an example of something that had an unhappy introduction, but has stabilised into a much better place. It has saved us money and introduced quality standards – but somehow it’s been difficult for us to get that message across.”

Uncomfortable messages

The various highly critical reports have certainly not made it easy for the MoJ to defend its project. The Justice Committee, for example, said that the MoJ “did not have a sufficient understanding of the complexities of court interpreting work”: is that a fair criticism? “We knew how the system worked,” she replies, arguing that the problem lay elsewhere: “Initially you had a bunch of people who didn’t want to join a system in which they’d be paid less money, and there was a hiatus around that.”

Okay. How about some of the other criticisms? The Justice Committee found that the MoJ hadn’t conducted proper due diligence tests on the provider, and complained that the consultation had resulted in only minor changes to the plans. “I don’t think we do believe that messages from the consultation weren’t received,” Brennan responds: the interpreters had called loudly for a delay, and “we took a very clear view that said: if you’ve got a group of people who are not going to make as much money out of the new system, delaying it creates an opportunity for further confusion and the belief that we weren’t determined”. She argues that “the most important thing was to demonstrate that we were going to get on and do this. We took the judgement that we were better to crack on and do it than to have a haemorraghing of interpreters who’d think that if they held out, we’d change our minds.”

But surely that single-minded concentration on pace left little room for trials, pilots, or development of the market so that the MoJ could choose from a range of providers? At this point the press officer interjects to suggest that we move onto a different topic – but this issue involves capabilities which, Brennan has said, are crucial to the department’s strategy, and CSW is reluctant to let it go.

Once again, though, Brennan gives pretty much the same answer: “The critical thing was convincing all the interpreters that this was the way we were going to go, and that they needed to log on and join the new system,” she replies. “If we’d postponed the start date, it appeared to us that it would be incentivising the interpreters not to come on board.” She adds that the MoJ did have emergency measures allowing courts to “go off-contract” if the ALS portal drew a blank, and points out that courts interpreters now receive similar rates to those employed by the NHS. “It just wasn’t right for us to carry on paying over the odds,” she says.

In 15 minutes of discussion on this topic, Brennan only gives an inch of ground on errors that the department might have made when asked what lessons the MoJ has learned from the experience. “We’ve tightened up our governance so that emerging problems get surfaced very quickly,” she says. “There were lessons about the messages we gave out to people in those early months, when things were difficult.”

In essence, Brennan argues that the need to move fast over-rode every other consideration, and that the initial chaos was a worthwhile sacrifice in order to get the new scheme in place. Hopefully, though, the courts interpreters scheme does not foreshadow future outsourcing projects – for now the MoJ is embarking on a new scheme that is much bigger, much more ambitious, and potentially much more dangerous.

Court interpreter service getting worse, new figures show

http://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/court-interpreter-service-getting-worse-new-figures-show 
2 April 2013 by Catherine Baksi

Court interpreter service getting worse, new figures show

The company contracted to provide court interpreters has failed to reach its performance target after a year, new statistics have revealed, leading to delay in thousands of court cases.

Figures released by the Ministry of Justice show that the performance got worse in the first month of this year and that the rate of complaints about the service have risen since August.

In a procurement process that has been heavily criticised, the MoJ awarded the interpreting contract to Applied Language Solutions, which was subsequently bought by Capita and is now called Capita Translation and Interpreting (CTI).

From the date that the contract started, on 30 January 2012 to 31 January 2013, CTI’s overall success rate was 90%, against a contractual target of 98%.

During the first year, CTI received 131,153 requests for language services covering 259 different languages. Of these, 14,823 (11%) ‘were cancelled by the requesting customer’ – that is either HM Courts & Tribunal Service or National Offender Management Service.

Of the remaining 116,330 requests, 104,932 were fulfilled or the requesting customer failed to attend – a success rate of 90% over the whole period.

In its statistical bulletin, the MoJ says that ‘presenting a single success rate does not provide the whole picture on the changes in the operation of the contract over the first 12 months’.

In the first month of the contract (January 30 to February 29, 2012), CTI fulfilled 67% of requests; in the second month this increased to 81%, and in the third month it fulfilled 90%. For the remainder of 2012 the success rate ranged between 92 and 95%.

However, by the end of January 2013 the success rate had fallen to just over 86%. The MoJ information says that this fall coincided with the contractor reducing the mileage rate paid to interpreters.

During the year, there were 6,417 complaints recorded relating to completed requests made, the majority due to the interpreter not attending or attending late. The data shows that the complaint rate (the number of complaints divided by the number of completed requests) increased between August 2012 and January 2013.

Courts minister Helen Grant said: ‘There has been a dramatic improvement in the interpreter contract since the early months, with the vast majority of bookings now being completed and a major reduction in complaints. Our changes have saved taxpayers £15m this year.

‘We are aware performance dipped very slightly this January when changes were made to interpreters' travel allowances and we are taking steps with the contractor to address this and drive further improvement.’

Court translation services slammed

http://www.insidetime.org/articleview.asp?a=1462&c=court_translation_services_slammed 
By Anna Moran, from insidetime issue April 2013

Court translation services slammed

A parliamentary committee has called the Ministry of Justice ‘shambolic’ in its handling of the outsourcing of court interpreting services to Applied Language Solutions says Anna Moran

The Justice Committee report published last month stated that
the MoJ:

• Did not have an adequate understanding of the needs of courts;
• Failed to heed warnings from professionals concerned; and
• Did not put sufficient safeguards in place to prevent interruptions in the provision of quality interpreting services to courts.

The evidence before the Committee suggested that the MoJ failed to properly understand the complexities of court interpreting and pushed ahead with the contract despite warnings that the plans proposed would diminish quality standards amongst those employed to provide court interpreting services. Indeed, professional
interpreters largely boycotted the scheme and refused to work for ALS, which found quickly that it did not have the resources to fulfil its obligations to the court for defendants, victims and witnesses. The result was serious and immediate operational problems leading to cancelled hearings and mis-translated proceedings and evidence, with particular effect on the criminal justice system, in which translators can be relied on from arrest to post-trial proceedings.

Helen Grant, Under Secretary of State for Justice conceded problems with the service initially, but said that there had been dramatic improvements and that “the changes we have made have led to major savings for taxpayers, totalling £15m in the first year”.

The Committee however states that such savings are illusionary, as the contract is currently being financially supported by Capita, and so any savings are effectively only coming at Capita’s expense, which leads to the conclusion the arrangement is financially unstable long term. In addition to the mounting costs, there is little evidence of any improvement in practice, with serious and frequent failings in the service still being reported, including proceedings being translated incorrectly or not at all.

Even more worryingly, the Committee also found that the MoJ had actively interfered with the collection of evidence during its investigation. It found that HMCTS had issued a direction to all staff that they must not participate in the Committee’s online consultation (with the aim of gathering evidence from front line staff), and had dissuaded members of the magistracy from participating. Whilst the Committee did not ask the House of Commons to take further action against the MoJ, it stated that it had given serious consideration to doing so, and that it had been ‘hampered’ by the MoJ’s ‘unhelpful’ conduct which it considered to amount to contempt of Parliament. It also made it clear that this sort of conduct should not be repeated in the future, calling it deplorable

The Committee has called for an independent review and revisions of the service arrangements in order to restore confidence of the judiciary, magistracy and legal professionals, and of course court users themselves. It will be monitoring the MoJ in its progress with the contract. Defendants and defence solicitors may also need to turn their minds to any effect that the problems may have had on court cases in the past 12 months that have relied on any form of translation, particularly on interpreted evidence.