“A wasteful exercise… and a recipe for miscarriage of justice cases”
Today the Law Society Gazette published a letter from solicitor Malcolm Fowler of Dennings LLP of Tipton in the West Midlands – a solicitor with 44 years’ experience in criminal law proceedings.
His letter is reproduced below.
A dip in interpreter provision. And on whose figures? Even Capita is now hard-pressed to attempt to present a positive picture. I have striven again and again in letters to the Ministry of Justice, from the secretary of state downwards, to secure a straight answer to a simple though basic question: whose figures and reports is the MoJ reliant upon?
I am far from being alone in a firmer than ever conviction that it is Capita on whom it is relying. And this to the exclusion of complaints from my branch of the profession, from the bar and from the judiciary at all levels. After all the ministry, in its present arrogant and smug mood, can be having no truck with evidence of failure of its ill-conceived contractual venture.
Why else would it have forbidden the judiciary to disclose its own stark evidence of non-delivery both in terms of absent interpreters and abysmally poor quality among those interpreters actually attending?
This is a wasteful exercise, first of all, and what is more a recipe for miscarriage of justice cases that will come to light in the years to come.
Just as the MoJ failed to listen to experienced professionals, i.e. linguists, when it set up its Interpretation [sic] Project (otherwise it would not have abused the English language so woefully. Ed.), it is now refusing to listen to other professionals – lawyers – with decades of experience in courts when they warn of dire consequences if the present courts and tribunals interpreting arrangment with Capita Trarnslation & Interpreting continues. Furthermore, it is also rumoured that many judges are also exceedingly fed up with the dire performance of Capita T&I (posts passim), but, usually being rather shy of publicity, very few will actually air their grievances in public (posts passim).
Hat tip: Madeleine Lee