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.).