Outsourcing and privatisation disaster outfit

Earlier this week The Law Society Gazette reported that the court interpreting service provided by Capita Translating & Interpreting (formerly ALS) is getting worse, contrary to the emollient assurances given to MPs by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Minister for Victims and the Courts, Helen Grant MP, that the service is has improved and is continuing to improve.

Capita Translating & Interpreting has failed to reach its performance target after a year, resulting in delays in thousands of court cases.

Figures released by the Ministry of Justice show that the performance actually fell in January 2013 the rate of complaints about the service has increased since August 2013.

For the first year of the contract, i.e. up to 31st January 2013, Capita Translating & Interpreting’s overall success rate was 90%, compared with a target of 98% in the contract.

During the year under review, Capita Translating & Interpreting received 131,153 requests for language services; these involved 259 different languages. Eleven per cent of these requests “were cancelled by the requesting customer”, i.e. either HM Courts & Tribunal Service or the National Offender Management Service. Of the remaining 116,330 requests, 104,932 were fulfilled or the requesting customer failed to attend, equivalent to a success rate of 90%.

In its statistical bulletin, the MoJ said 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” (that sounds like an excuse to me. Ed.). In addition, the MoJ is claiming that the fall in performance coincided with the contractor reducing the mileage rate paid to interpreters and Helen Grant MP is sticking to her guns with the improbable claim that the contract with Capita Translating & Interpreting is saving taxpayers £15 mn. per annum.

Hat tip: Bristol Red

Could Carlos Tévez, Manchester City FC’s Argentine forward, be the highest profile victim yet of the court interpreting disaster (posts passim) presided over by Capita Translating and Interpreting/ALS?

According to a report in today’s Daily Mail, Tévez “was bailed because there was no interpreter at Macclesfield Police Station. He is to return there on Tuesday.”

Cheshire Police have a contract with Capita Translating and Interpreting for the provision of interpreters.

Tévez was banned from driving for 6 months on 16th January for failing to respond to police letters and was arrested on suspicion of driving while disqualified last Thursday near his home in Alderley Edge, Cheshire.

If I were the man in black blowing the whistle, I’d given Capita Translating and Interpreting a red card and send them off the pitch for an early bath. 😉

Hat tip: Linguist Lounge

It’s not just interpreters that are dismayed at the shambles that has been the outsourcing of court interpreting services (posts passim). Barristers are now beginning to show their frustration too.

Below is the transcript of an interview given by Michael Turner QC, Chairman of the Criminal Bar Association, to BBC 3 Counties Radio on 27th February 2013.

This Government and the last have been obsessed by outsourcing publicly funded work.

The problem with the present interpreter service which was started off by Applied Language Solutions (ALS) and is now Capita is that interpreters don’t turn up or when they do turn up they don’t speak the right language or they don’t speak English. It’s a con on the tax payer and a con on the victims of crime.

It costs at a very conservative estimate £110 a minute to run a court room with a jury and so you imagine if an interpreter doesn’t turn up for half a day or an hour, what the on cost of that really is for the tax payer and that is what is happening.

They often don’t speak the language of the defendant, or if they do they can’t speak English, so we can’t understand them.

What happens when you outsource to the private sector is that the private sector is desperate to make a profit and therefore it pays absolutely appalling wages. If you want proper interpreting services these are professional people and you have to pay them properly. It is as simple as that.

Lawyers see this on a daily basis. It is just not providing proper savings for the tax payer. This is country wide.

What the Government has not done is properly assess whether this is a true saving to the tax payer.

If you have an interpretation service which doesn’t actually provide the proper interpreters and that causes a delay in the court system, the victim of crime is let down, because the victim’s case can’t get on and it can’t be tried.

As soon as you have got a court which is not sitting and is delayed you are costing the tax payer £110 per minute for that service. That £15 million which the Government pretends it has saved is replicated 10 times over on another balance sheet which the tax payer never sees.

We have been screaming at the Government about this and we are yet to see whether it pays any dividends but the tax payer should know they are not getting value for money.

The Justice Minister is not at the coal face and I and my members are and you can’t rely on those assurances of £15 million savings.

Mr Turner has given his permission for these comments to be published widely.

A survey commissioned by umbrella group Professional Interpreters for Justice (PI4J) has revealed that four in five interpreters (81%) are still refusing to join the private register operated by Capita for interpreting jobs in courts and other parts of the justice system, even though the contract has been in operation for over one year.

The group will now share the new survey findings with Justice Minister Helen Grant MP (I bet she ignores them! Ed.) as she considers her response to the recent Justice Committee report (6th February), which described the Ministry’s handling of the court interpreting contract as ‘nothing short of shambolic’ and said it ‘failed to heed warnings from the professionals concerned’ (posts passim).

Meanwhile Michael Turner QC, the Chairman of the Criminal Bar Association, speaking in an interview with BBC 3 Counties Radio, said the contract with Capita is ‘a con on the taxpayer and a con on the victims of crime’.

A succession of six-monthly online surveys since August 2011 have consistently shown 80%-90% of qualified and experienced freelance interpreters refusing to work under the new system because professional standards have been lowered by the private contractor and the interests of justice are not being served.

Madeleine Lee of the Professional Interpreters Alliance, one of 10 organisations comprising Professional Interpreters for Justice, said: “We can’t call a strike because we are freelancers. Nonetheless the strength of feelings has been borne out and the majority are not willing to work for Capita. It’s very clear that after one year it’s not simply a matter of pay, it’s a matter of principles, standards and quality – we don’t want to be lumped in with others who are not as qualified as we are”.

A total of 859 interpreters completed the online survey between 29 January and 10 February 2013 with the results showing that the calls to review the Framework Agreement and the Capita contract are still supported by the majority of those in the profession.

Keith Moffitt, Chair of the Chartered Institute of Linguists, also part of PI4J, said: “The survey findings are strong evidence for the Ministry of Justice that interpreters cannot be persuaded to work under the Framework Agreement or the Capita contract. The dissatisfaction of interpreters who haven’t registered to work was echoed by those who have in fact signed up for jobs with Capita TI, who said they were not happy with the pay and conditions offered and felt mistreated.”

58% of those refusing to register with Capita stated they have been telephoned directly by Court clerks in the last 3 months with urgent requests for them to attend court because Capita has let them down.

Geoffrey Buckingham, Chair of the Association of Police and Court Interpreters (ACPI), said: “We will be discussing with the Justice Minister that there have not been the marked improvements to the service which she believes are happening. How can there be when over half of the respondents to our survey who refuse to sign up with Capita say they are being contacted by courts desperate to get them to work? There have been continual breaches and no published statistics by the Ministry of Justice since August 2012. Those which were published last year are unaudited. The surveys we have commissioned are the only insights into what is happening and how interpreters feel and any attempts to persuade them to work under the Framework Agreement are bound to fail”.

The Ministry of Justice has been repeatedly criticised, most recently by the Justice Committee, for signing a four year Framework Agreement for language services with Applied Language Solutions (ALS) which was acquired by Capita in December 2011 and now operates as Capita Translation and Interpreting.

Incidences of interpreter ‘no-shows’ and poor quality interpreting at courts and police stations across the UK are still being reported at an alarming rate. For example, on 7th February at Snaresbrook Crown Court a case collapsed due to disputed interpreting by a Sylheti (Bangladeshi) linguist, resulting in Judge Joana Korner CMG QC specifically instructing the Crown Prosecution Service not to “hire any interpreters in future who are not on the National Register”.

Professional Interpreters for Justice (PI4J) have rejected Justice Minister Helen Grant MP’s publicly stated figures on the performance of Capita TI. On 16 January, in a written answer to Shadow Justice Minister Sadiq Khan, she said there was an “increasing improvement in service to 93.5% performance by August 2012” (I think I smell burning knickers. Ed.).

Campaign group Professional Interpreters for Justice (PI4J) has condemned Justice Minister Helen Grant’s response to the Justice Committee’s scathing report published on 6 February as “glib” (posts passim).

Keith Moffitt, Chair of the Chartered Institute of Linguists, representing PI4J says: “If the Minister, as she has stated, wants to work ‘effectively and positively’ with the interpreting community to develop a system that meets the needs of the justice sector, then she must take the report’s findings seriously. This continued repetition of misleading and inaccurate figures is not helping and there is a real risk of the legal interpreter profession collapsing altogether”.

The report described the Ministry of Justice’s outsourcing of court language services as “nothing short of shambolic” and concluded that performance figures for the contract are likely to represent a “significant overestimate” and “clearly do not reflect the company’s fulfilment against 100% of the requirements of HMCTS and should be altered, retrospectively and in the future, to indicate this”.

In spite this, Justice Minister Helen Grant continues to insist that while there had been “significant” issues at the start of the contract last year, “swift and robust action” has led to “dramatic improvements”.

Commenting on the report she said: “The vast majority of interpreter bookings are now being completed and complaints have fallen considerably. The changes we have made have led to major savings for taxpayers, totalling £15 mn. in the first year and we continue to monitor the contract on a daily basis and demand continuing progress.”

PI4J has repeatedly rejected the misleading and unverified figures published by the Ministry and asserts that the Ministry of Justice has deliberately given the wrong picture about its contractor’s performance. Independent calculations estimate that the performance figure for the contract is nearer 50% rather than the Minister’s publicly stated figure of 95% and that fulfilment of the Framework Agreement, which has a total potential value of up to £42 mn. per year, is currently at just 20%.

Nick Rosenthal, Chair of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI), who gave evidence at the Justice Committee hearing on 23 October added: “We have told the Minister that in order to continue the discussions with us about improving quality in court interpreting, there needs to be recognition that the quality issues are a result of the system which uses a single private contractor and that alternative models must be considered”.

PI4J is calling for the Minister to revert immediately to the previous National Agreement arrangement whereby qualified interpreters were sourced using the NRPSI. The value of the National Register was endorsed by the JSC report in its conclusions and recommendations, saying “there do not appear to have been any fundamental problems with the quality of services, where they were properly sourced i.e. through arrangements that were underpinned by the National Register of Public Service Interpreters.”

Incidences of interpreter “no-shows” and poor quality interpreting at courts and police stations across the UK are still being reported at an alarming rate. This week a trial at Snaresbrook Crown Court collapsed on 7 February due to disputed interpreting by a Sylheti linguist, resulting in Judge Joana Korner CMG QC specifically instructing the Crown Prosecution Service not to “hire any interpreters in future who are not on the National Register”.

Geoffrey Buckingham, Chairman of the Association of Police and Court Interpreters (APCI), concludes: “The Framework Agreement and the contract with Capita do not work and never will. The Ministry of Justice was determined to push this through in the face of overwhelming evidence that it would reduce the quality of language services. This failed delivery model must be abandoned and replaced by arrangements that ensure justice can be delivered consistently through the use of properly qualified professional interpreters.”

PI4J is awaiting a reply from the Justice Minister to a letter sent on 22 January expressing their dissatisfaction with Helen Grant’s cavalier use of statistics.

Helen Grant’s glibness also finds expression in other forms: despite her constituency home being a mere 19 miles from the House of Commons in Westminster, she has the temerity to claim a second home allowance, as the BBC reported last November.

Campaign group Professional Interpreters for Justice has condemned Justice Minister Helen Grant’s glib response to the scathing report published by the Justice Select Committee (JSC) this week (posts passim).

The report, which described the Ministry of Justice’s outsourcing of court language services as “nothing short of shambolic”, concluded that performance figures for the contract are likely to represent a “significant overestimate” and “clearly do not reflect the company’s fulfilment against 100% of the requirements of HMCTS and should be altered, retrospectively and in the future, to indicate this”.

Despite this, Justice Minister Helen Grant continues to insist that while there had been “significant” issues at the start of the contract last year, “swift and robust action” has led to “dramatic improvements”.

Commenting on the report she said: “The vast majority of interpreter bookings are now being completed and complaints have fallen considerably. The changes we have made have led to major savings for taxpayers, totalling £15 mn. in the first year and we continue to monitor the contract on a daily basis and demand continuing progress.”

Professional Interpreters for Justice (PI4J) has repeatedly rejected the misleading and unverified figures published by the Ministry and asserts that the MoJ has deliberately given the wrong picture about its contractor’s performance. Independent calculations estimate that the performance figure for the contract is nearer 50%* rather than the Minister’s publicly stated figure of 95% (16th January) and that fulfilment of the Framework Agreement, which has a total potential value of up to £42 mn. per annum, is currently at just 20%.

Keith Moffitt, Chair of the Chartered Institute of Linguists, representing PI4J says: If the Minister, as she has stated, wants to work “effectively and positively” with the interpreting community to develop a system that meets the needs of the justice sector, then she must take the report’s findings seriously. This continued repetition of misleading and inaccurate figures is not helping and there is a real risk of the legal interpreter profession collapsing altogether”.

Nick Rosenthal, Chair of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI), who gave evidence at the JSC hearing (23 Oct) added: “We have told the Minister that in order to continue the discussions with us about improving quality in court interpreting, there needs to be recognition that the quality issues are a result of the system which uses a single private contractor and that alternative models must be considered”.

PI4J is calling for the Minister to revert immediately to the previous National Agreement arrangement under which qualified interpreters were sourced using the NRPSI. The value of the National Register was endorsed by the Justice Committee’s report in its conclusions and recommendations (no.4), which states: “there do not appear to have been any fundamental problems with the quality of services where they were properly sourced i.e. through arrangements that were underpinned by the National Register of Public Service Interpreters.”

Instances of interpreter “no shows” and poor quality interpreting at courts and police stations across the UK are still being reported at an alarming rate. Just this week a trial at Snaresbrook Crown Court collapsed (7th February) due to disputed interpreting by a Sylheti (Bangladeshi) linguist, resulting in Judge Joana Korner CMG QC specifically instructing the Crown Prosecution Service not to “hire any interpreters in future who are not on the National Register”.

Geoffrey Buckingham, Chairman, Association of Police and Court Interpreters (APCI), concludes: “The Framework Agreement and the contract with Capita do not work and never will. The Ministry of Justice was determined to push this through in the face of overwhelming evidence that it would reduce the quality of language services. This failed delivery model must be abandoned and replaced by arrangements that ensure justice can be delivered consistently through the use of properly qualified professional interpreters.”

Finally, PI4J is awaiting a reply from the Justice Minister to a letter sent on 22nd January criticising Helen Grant’s use of statistics.