Courts: Resourcing and Staffing - Motion to Take Note
Part of the debate – in the House of Lords at 4:16
pm on 14th July 2016.
Baroness Coussins Crossbench
My Lords, I rise with some trepidation as the only
non-lawyer to speak in this debate. I am most grateful to my noble and learned
friend Lord Woolf for providing the opportunity for me to draw attention to one
particular specialist aspect of the resources available to our courts. I refer
to the right to interpreting services and the way in which these services are
provided. I declare an interest as a vice-president of the Chartered Institute
of Linguists and put on record my sincere thanks to my fellow vice-president,
Professor Tim Connell, for his invaluable help with background research on this
topic. I am also grateful to the National Register of Public Service
Interpreters for its briefing.
The right to interpretation is currently enshrined
in EU law under Article 2 of the directive of the European Parliament dated 20
October 2010. This is several clauses long, so I shall quote just the first and
last to summarise the key points. Article 2 reads:
“Member states shall ensure that suspected or
accused persons who do not speak or understand the language of the criminal
proceedings concerned are provided, without delay, with interpretation during
criminal proceedings before investigative and judicial authorities, including
during police questioning, all court hearings and any necessary interim
hearings”.
The article concludes:
“Interpretation provided under this Article shall
be of a quality sufficient to safeguard the fairness of the proceedings, in
particular by ensuring that suspected or accused persons have knowledge of the
case against them and are able to exercise their right of defence”.
I know that Her Majesty’s Government regard
themselves as in compliance with this directive, although in practice the
service has been less than satisfactory. In 2012, the MoJ awarded the contract
for court interpreting services to ALS, later Capita TI. This met with fierce
controversy, with 66% of qualified interpreters refusing to work under the new
system because of reduced pay rates and lack of professional recognition. The
MoJ’s objective was to make savings of £18 million a year and to rationalise
provision, but as an article in the Law Society Gazette pointed out,
this was a false economy because of the costs of rescheduling court hearings
after inadequate interpreters had led to magistrates and judges deciding they
could not continue. Problems included unqualified or underqualified
interpreters and people with no experience of courts or the judicial system and
its language. In one case, the so-called interpreter did not know the
difference between murder and manslaughter. People with the wrong language turned up: in
one case, a Lithuanian interpreter arrived for a Slovakian prisoner;
fortunately, they both spoke Polish so they muddled through. Often no one
turned up at all because of a flawed booking system.
An investigation into the service by the National
Audit Office revealed serious and systematic problems, many of which were then
addressed by the Government. In fairness, this did lead to improved performance
by Capita, although many, particularly the organisations representing professional
interpreters, have pointed out that the performance measures used mask
significant variations in quality. I am not convinced that the savings we are
told have been made as a result of modifications towards the end of the Capita
contract take into account the true cost of court delays, case adjournments,
repeated remands in custody for offenders, and other related expenses of
underperformance.
A debate in the other place in June 2013 queried
the £15 million savings that had been claimed and revealed that the courts
themselves had made nearly 6,500 complaints about poor interpreting standards,
and that in 2012 alone 608 magistrates’ court cases and 34 Crown Court cases
were recorded as ineffective because interpreters were not available. Sir James
Munby, President of the Family Division, criticised Capita TI for its
“lamentable” failure to provide interpreters seven times in the course of a
single adoption case between 2012 and 2014, as a result of which Capita TI was
ordered to pay £16,000 in costs. In another example, district judge David
Taylor in Bristol had to delay a hearing twice because Capita TI was unable to
supply a Polish interpreter, even though there are more than 300 of them on the
national register.
The MoJ’s own statistics reported that in 2015
there were 2,100 complaints about Capita’s service, the most common of which
was “no interpreter available”. I was surprised to learn from a Written Answer
in April this year that the costs for rescheduling cases are not recorded, so
how the MoJ is actually monitoring any target savings is beyond me.
There are other important supply and resource
issues to which I would like to draw the Minister’s attention. One concerns
residency, an issue that was debated in more detail earlier today in this
Chamber. This is a very good case in point: 27% of interpreters on the national
register are non-UK nationals. If their residency status is not preserved as
part of Brexit negotiations, this could have a dramatic negative impact on the
availability of court interpreters for European languages.
Another issue is security clearance, where the MoJ
and the Home Office appear to be at odds. In October 2012, the MoJ stated that
all interpreters used by Capita TI were security vetted up to enhanced DBS
level as a minimum. But the DBS, which comes under the Home Office, has told
the National Register of Public Service Interpreters that it can see “no
circumstances” under which an interpreter would qualify for enhanced clearance.
As freelancers, interpreters have to face the additional hurdle of not having
an employer to sign off the application, so some simply give up trying to
square the various security circles on clearance and leave the profession.
A solution to this impasse, recommended by the national register, would be to
amend the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions) Order 1975 by
adding “interpreting in the public services” to the excepted professions in
Schedule 1. Will the Minister commit to looking seriously at this proposal, or
urge his successor to do so?
The recent announcement that the MoJ has awarded
new contracts from this autumn to a different company, thebigword, is welcome,
certainly in principle, as is the fact that a separate contract is to be
awarded for monitoring quality. However, I would like the Minister’s assurance
that a range of factors concerned with performance, quality and standards have
been fully taken on board, in particular: the exclusive use of suitably
qualified interpreters; sustainable terms and conditions of employment; independent
auditing of quality and performance; and statutory protection of title. I would
also like an assurance from the Minister that the Brexit negotiations will
ensure there is no departure from, or diminution in, the right of anybody to
interpretation in the criminal justice system, as currently guaranteed under
the October 2010 directive.
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