Reading through the MoJ‘s response to the Justice Select Committee report, there are so many points that have to be challenged and demolished that it’s difficult to know where to start, but let’s begin with the proposed changes to linguist payments. It should not be forgotten that when National Audit Office, Public Accounts Committee and Justice Select Committee were investigating the FWA, Capita was paying 40p/mile and a £5 supplement for online booking, since then Capita cut the rate to 20p/mile and scrapped the supplement. If Helen Grant considers the proposed enhancements as a step forward, they come after Capita has already taken 2 steps backwards.

1. Paying 20p/mile for the first 10 miles of each leg of a journey. That’s worth £4, but is still small change compared to what Capita linguists lost when the mileage rate was cut from 40p/mile.

2. Tier 1 linguists to be paid £22/hour for Tier 2 assignments, so that’s an extra £2/hour, but let’s not forget withdrawal of the £5 online booking supplement.

3. Payment for 15 minute blocks. On average, this would mean being paid for an extra 7 minutes per assignment, or £2.56 per assignment. See 2 above.

4. Cancellation fees. It remains to be seen what the cancellation fee is going to be, and how short the notice has to be before it becomes payable. I wonder if this will coincide with Capita introducing a cancellation penalty on linguists that cancel their booking at short notice.

5. Daily fee to help cover incidental costs that a linguist may occur. Note the use of the phrase ‘help to cover’, rather than ‘to cover’. It remains to be seen how much this fee is going to be. Maybe on arrival at court, the booking clerk will give each linguist £1 to help cover the cost of a cup of tea and a packet of crisps*.

It would be interesting to know how these are intended to be paid to linguists. It would only make sense for these to be paid through Capita, otherwise it completely undermines the benefit of only dealing with one supplier. This can only mean that MoJ is going to increase the rates it pays to Capita in order to cover the cost of these enhanced payments. Given that what Capita charges now is commercially sensitive and therefore not revealed by MoJ (though everyone has figured out what it is) will the MoJ be disclosing how much extra it intends to pay Capita?

Could this be the Trojan horse the MoJ is looking for to funnel extra cash into Capita’s pockets so that they can start to recoup their losses and make profits instead? After all, isn’t that the whole point of outsourcing? Whenever public money is being spent, shouldn’t our chums in big business be given the opportunity to line their pockets with taxpayer’s money?

Reposted – with a few links and tags added – from Linguist Lounge. Read the original.

* = Shouldn’t that be peanuts? Ed.

The Ministry of Justice seems to think that justice is something that comes at a price, not something that has an intrinsic non-pecuniary value. Ever since the coalition government got its foot in the door of the MoJ in Petty France, their primary concern seems to have been to save money, not to ensure that justice – that nebulous, non-quantifiable concept of moral rightness based on ethics, rationality, law, natural law, religion, equity or fairness, as well as the administration of the law – is administered fairly and equitably.

It started with interpreting services for courts and tribunals (posts passim), a topic this blog has been monitoring closely for many months.

That saga began with then Justice Minister Crispin Blunt erroneously describing court interpreters as ‘grossly overpaid‘ and ‘taking advantage of the system’ as justification for handing the whole lot over to the consistently under-performing Capita/ALS. What started as a scheme intended to save £18 mn. a year out of an annual budget of £60 mn. is having the opposite effect as justice is denied, delayed or provided at increased cost to the public purse as trials are delayed due to underqualified or unqualified interpreters being provided, interpreters not turning up at all and defendants being remanded in custody.

The ministers and mandarins at the MoJ will of course deny that this is the situation (and probably couldn’t care less about it either. Ed.), despite courts interpreting service provided by Capita being condemned by two House of Commons Select Committees – the Public Accounts Committee and the Justice Committee.

In its latest daft idea to try and save money, the MoJ is turning its attention to ‘reforming’ (i.e. cutting. Ed.) legal aid for criminal cases.

A report in Sunday’s Express states that more than 1,500 High Street solicitors will be forced to close branches “within a year” if the Government’s – i.e. the MoJ’s – controversial legal aid reform plans succeed.

This latest money-saving MoJ wheeze is being piloted by Justice Minister Chris Grayling and is intended to save £220 mn. from the £2 bn. legal aid bill. Lawyers and MPs are warning that these measures would transform Britain’s legal system from one of the world’s most respected to that of a “banana republic”.

Some 1,600 local solicitors firms offer legal aid for criminal cases. Under Grayling’s proposals this figure would be slashed to 400, with contracts for criminal work tendered for the lowest bid going to bulk providers like supermarket giant Tesco, Olympics fiasco security firm G4S and the haulier Eddie Stobart, whose primary businesses aren’t in any way connected with the provision of legal advice (would you engage a plumber to fix a leaking roof? Ed.).

Under Grayling’s plans, defendants who cannot afford to pay for advocates will no be able longer choose their own legal aid provider but will be assigned one. That legal aid provider will be paid one fee for the case regardless of the advocate’s performance and whether or not a client pleads guilty.

This will remove a fundamental right from defendants in criminal trials – the right to choose a legal representative of one’s choice.

Furthermore, Michael Turner QC, head of the 4,000 strong Criminal Bar Association, has warned: “Our barristers’ system will fail. Our brilliant judiciary comes from the Bar. Once you have Tesco and G4S providing advocates, you will get Tesco and G4S judges in 10 years’ time. Make no bones about it, we are facing absolute devastation to what is the finest legal system in the world.”

A barrister of my acquaintance has described this as “killing the criminal bar,” adding, “Soon we will have wholly state-appointed defence lawyers and a guarantor of British liberty will die.”

If one takes the MoJ’s track record as shown by courts and tribunals interpreting, the result will prove to be disastrous and another breeding ground for miscarriages of justice.

Needless to say, there’s a petition against the MoJ’s plans. The petition’s text is reproduced below.

Save UK Justice

Responsible department: Ministry of Justice

The MoJ should not proceed with their plans to reduce access to justice by depriving citizens of legal aid or the right to representation by the Solicitor of their choice.

It’s time the MoJ looked at the big picture, not just the bottom line of the financial statements.

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

Yesterday senior mandarins reported to the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on progress to date. However, PAC Chair Margaret Hodge MP expressed concern that within the Civil Service failure frequently went unpunished, stating:

“The mood out there is all too often people in the Civil Service don’t get held to account for performance and may get rewarded for failure; and most recently we saw the Home Affairs Select Committee report on UKBA where the head of UKBA – and this is no [sic] personal; it’s not for me to judge, but just hearing what Home Affairs Select Committee did – the head of UKBA was found more than wanting and they expressed surprise that she’d then been given the stewardship of HMRC. Now for the public that doesn’t establish great confidence.

Margaret Hodge later listed some of the more spectacular failures in Whitehall’s record of contracting out public services:

I remember the West Coast main line; that was a fiasco. I remember the MoJ interpreters’ contract; that was a fiasco in the MoJ. I’m afraid the DWP – you may think they’re improving – we think that the way they’ve handled the contracts on the Work Programme has been less than satisfactory.

For the benefit of Ministry of Justice mandarins and Capita Translation & Interpreting, the dictionary definition of a fiasco is “a complete failure, especially one that is ignominious or humiliating“. 🙂

Hat tip: Geoffrey Buckingham

At the end of last week, the New Law Journal carried an interesting report on the case of R. v. Applied Language Solutions. Applied Language Solutions is better known nowadays as Capita Translation & Interpreting, the not very competent custodians of the Ministry of Justice’s contract for providing interpreting services for courts and tribunals.

R. v. Applied Language Solutions itself concerned a disputed costs order for £23.25 imposed ALS it after a Slovakian interpreter arrived late at Sheffield Crown Court due to a communications mix-up.

However, what is of interest are the remarks of the judge, the President of the Queen’s Bench Division, Sir John Thomas, who expressed surprise at Capita Translation and Interpreting Ltd’s argument that it need only supply court interpreters on time and in the right place 98% of the time to fulfil its contractual obligations. Bear in mind at this point that 98% is the performance target set for the contract by the Ministry of Justice – a target that Capita has never even met once during the first 12 months of the contract (posts passim).

Delivering his judgment, Sir John said: “We cannot accept this argument…without [an interpreter] a case cannot proceed. It seems to us inconceivable that the Ministry of Justice would have entered into a contract where the obligation… was framed in any terms other than an absolute obligation. It is simply no use to a court having an interpreter there on 98% of occasions when interpreters are required, because if an interpreter is required justice cannot be done without one and a case cannot proceed.”

Sir John, the third most senior judge in England and Wales, evidently has more faith in the Ministry of Justice than some of us; it may be inconceivable to him that it entered into a contract with a percentage obligation, but that’s what it’s done.

Furthermore, Sir John would seem to have an absolutist view of the efficient administration of justice, first mentioned in Magna Carta to the effect that: “To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay, right or justice.” This principle was of course conveniently forgotten by the Ministry of Justice when concluding the ALS/Capita interpreting contract (posts passim).