Lost in translation
In 2010, the Ministry of Justice outsourced its courts translation work – but the contractor struggled, and the system ground to a halt. As the probation outsourcing looms, Joshua Chambers looks at the lessons to be learned
Bulgarian burglars and Venezuelan victims of crime might not speak the best English but, like anybody facing a British court, they are entitled to understand the proceedings and to be understood. That’s why HM Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) hires specialist interpreters, speaking everything from Swahili to Spanish, to ensure that everyone gets an equal hearing. However, two years ago, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) outsourced its interpreting and translating services in a contract that MPs this month described as “shambolic”. Although things are now improving, the operation of the courts suffered – and there are broader lessons to be learned by those across Whitehall who are involved in the move to commission out more public services.
Two parliamentary committees have reported on the problems with the MoJ’s outsourcing scheme: the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) late last year and, earlier this month, the Commons’ Justice Committee. Meanwhile, last September the National Audit Office published its own in-depth analysis.
Before the reforms, interpreters were called in directly by courts, police forces and other criminal justice agencies. They were paid locally, but a fee structure and registration system was set nationally. The new system put a private sector contractor, ALS, in charge – and with all calls being routed through the company, things quickly began to wrong.
The Justice Committee’s report says that the MoJ “did not have a sufficient understanding of the complexities of court interpreting work”, and that this problem was compounded by insufficient consultation with interpreters. Geoffrey Buckingham, chairman of the Association of Police and Court Interpreters, says “the starting point is the failure of the MoJ to properly consult with interpreters and their representatives”.
Hence, the MoJ didn’t have a full understanding of the existing system when it moved to a tiered system that grades interpreters and means less qualified people can take on some of the work previously performed by registered translators. “The problem with [the tiered system] is nobody understands what it is, how it works, and who’s in what tiers,” says Buckingham. “It’s a stupid idea where, ostensibly for types of less-important case, you can call somebody with lower qualifications.”
Interpreters were clearly unhappy with the change, as they were with the accompanying pay cuts. “Looking at the framework agreement, pay was going to be very substantially reduced and we knew people couldn’t afford to work for that sort of money,” Buckingham says. Indeed, as the Justice Committee notes, the new system makes most of its savings by cutting wages rather than bureaucracy or duplication.
The MoJ did consult with other staff such as police and magistrates; but the Justice Committee says the resultant changes were “not extensive”. Tom Gash, an Institute for Government programme director, says the contract’s problems demonstrate the need to “take seriously the views across the system” before finalising plans. “Consultation processes can sometimes fall into paper-based exercises that people largely ignore,” he says, but they should be about “genuine engagement”.
The Justice Committee also charges the MoJ with failing to conduct proper due diligence on its chosen supplier. “The whole contract was a mess,” says Sir Alan Beith, the committee’s chairman. ALS was a regional company, but the MoJ wanted to give it a national contract – so the department ignored a report which indicated that it should only give ALS contracts worth up to £1m, instead pledging it work worth £42m. “When you’re contracting with an organisation, you need to be confident that it’s got the ability to deliver a service,” Gash says. ALS had a good regional reputation but “rolling a service out across the country is tricky, and you wouldn’t expect good service straight away”.
Peter Handcock, chief executive of the HMCTS, told PAC last year “there is no doubt that, with the benefit of hindsight, we would look at the due diligence we did on this contract in a completely different way, and we would test it a bit more thoroughly”.
Problems with the outsourcing were compounded by two factors. First, the MoJ decided not to pilot the programme. Second, the department didn’t penalise the contractor as soon as things started going wrong; the PAC report notes that “risible levels of penalties and low expectations of performance allow private companies to get away with over-promising and under-delivering”.
Certainly, ALS under-delivered. The new system ran into immediate difficulties when professional interpreters, who were seriously unhappy with the new system, boycotted it. It then juddered to a halt: courts couldn’t find sufficient trained interpreters; people were held unnecessarily in prison cells because they couldn’t be tried; and costs escalated in the justice system. One court in Ipswich even turned to ‘Google Translate’.
Since then “performance has undoubtedly improved markedly”, the Justice Committee notes, “but this has taken a long time to achieve”. Nor are things perfect: although ALS was taken over by Capita, a much larger provider, the system is yet to meet the full demands of the HMCTS and courts are still sourcing some interpreters themselves.
Responding to the Justice Committee report, justice minister Helen Grant said that “there were significant issues at the start of the contract in early 2012 but we took swift and robust action and have seen dramatic improvements, as the Justice Select Committee highlights. 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 £15m in the first year, and we continue to monitor the contract on a daily basis and demand continuing progress”.
Under the contract’s penalty clauses, Capita is now paying the additional bills created by its inability to supply interpreters – such as extra prosecution and defence costs. This means that the MoJ gets its £15m, but the Justice Committee notes that “there may be future ramifications for the department when it comes to recommissioning interpreting and translation services if these financial issues are not resolved”. The committee is also unhappy with the MoJ because it feels its investigations were obstructed. It asked frontline staff to contribute to its inquiry, but the MoJ refused to provide it with contact details and issued an edict instructing staff not to participate. Grant told the committee that under the Osmotherly Rules, “officials should not take part in research projects or surveys designed to establish their personal views on government policies”. However, the committee believes this “may have constituted contempt” of Parliament, and Beith says he wants the Commons to assess this when it debates Parliamentary Privilege.
So what lessons could other departments learn from this rather ramshackle example of outsourcing? Beith says civil servants clearly need more training in commissioning – particularly those without any experience in the field. Gash adds that “as outsourcing goes nearer to the heart of public service delivery, getting these sorts of things right becomes more important, and there’s a big question to ask government about whether, given the scale of the ambition around outsourcing and the use of market mechanisms in public services, there’s enough being done to build the flexibility and capacity of the civil service and local commissioners”. Last month, Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude announced the launch of a Commissioning Academy to train public servants in outcome-based commissioning, market engagement and development, and joint commissioning across organisational boundaries. Gash believes this will help.
However, Labour’s shadow justice minister Andy Slaughter identifies bigger problems in the way the civil service handles such projects. “Quite senior civil servants had not properly scrutinised what’s happening, did not sign off on contracts, and that’s clearly wrong,” he says. “Having said that: the buck has to stop with ministers, because their unrealistic timetables and financial targets led to this happening.” Meanwhile, Gash says that civil servants shouldn’t always choose the cheapest options: “This is a symptom of the times, where there is a lot of pressure on budgets, and people are tempted to go for low-cost options, which don’t always provide good value for money. You have to be careful of what the risks are.”
In Whitehall terms, this was a fairly small contract – but the MoJ is embarking on a much larger outsourcing project: sourcing some probation and rehabilitation services via the market by 2015. If it again fails to ensure it understands the system; to properly consult and react to the answers it receives; to pilot its approach properly; and to conduct due diligence on its preferred providers – well, then it may find that it has a far bigger and more costly outsourcing disaster on its hands.
Joshua Chambers is Civil Service World's Deputy and Online Editor.
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12 Comments
SEEMS THE ONLY SOLUTION IS TO KEEP THINGS IN HOUSE, OUTSOURCING WILL NEVER WORK AS PRIVATE COMPANIES WILL LOOK TO DO THINGS THE CHEAPEST WAY, WHILST MAKING BIG PROFITS,NOT ALWAYS THE BEST WAY, IF YOU’RE ON THE RECEIVING END OF A CHEAP SYSTEM IT COULD HAVE DEVASTATING RESULTS TO THE INDIVIDUAL, AND ALSO TO THE INTEGRITY OF THE JUSTICE SYSYTEM AS A WHOLE…
How about sponsoring current civil servants who have the skills and ability to do the job to attain professional qualifications as translators? With such a wide civil service workforce, there must be a large pool of employees with language capabilities. The issue may be affected by a department’s desire to justify their worth as say if an employee at the FCO is called upon for cover in court as a translator, his productivity ‘%’ at his parent department will obviously drop. This I don’t think the parent department would be happy about …
Jimmy, this exact same premise (“There must be a large pool of employees with language capabilities”), was used by a superintendent David Wilkinson from Greater Manchester Police who in a letter written in early 2009 on the force’s then forthcoming moves to outsource, wrote:
“There must be a huge amount of ‘untapped’ interpreting skills in our immigrant communities”.
This is a really dangerous and lazy assumption and the best word for the belief of Superintendent Wilkinson is – even being kind – DELUDED.
Interpreters are professionals and there is no guarantee that FCO officials, who I must surely be right in assuming are largely based in London, are going to be competent legal interpreters. Furthermore, the interpreters the MOJ Framework Agreement concern are mainly court interpreters. There are frequent – daily – requirements, often at short notice, for Police forces the length and breadth of the country. Juggling that with a full-time job is near-impossible. Large swaths of the mainly unqualified ALS Capita workforce can barely wait to dash out of court back to their shifts in kebab shops and factory production lines, student lectures and childcare duties so I can’t see how FCO staff based in London can attend an arson victim in Manchester or child rape complainant required in Hull at 11pm on a Tuesday night. Not happening. Admire the idea – but it’s not founded in reality. But I’m an interpreter and I don’t expect you to know what I repeatedly warned both the local Dibble and also the MOJ for the best part of three or four years.
They knew best. Or so they thought. Deluded.
There are several agneices who provide interpreters/translators for agneices such as the police, social services and the NHS. Most staff are paid on an hourly basis and work as and when required. Qualifications as such are not needed, but a CRB check is required before they can do certain types of work. If I can suggest one, ITL in Gateshead may be able to point you in the right direction.
@Jimmy Kan: Your comment encapsulates the ignorance that led to the MoJ interpreting contract in the first place. It takes years to become proficient enough in a foreign language and to work to a professional standard as a translator or interpreter. Your comment is extremely naive and an insult to the professionally qualified, experienced, registered, vetted, accountable public service interpreters the Ministry sought to bully into accepting lower pay and working alongside unqualified bilinguals. The UK’s courts have not enjoyed the services of a great many Registered Public Service Interpreters since this contract was rolled out 13 months ago. If they want amateurs, they can have amateurs.
Jimmy, this exact same premise (“There must be a large pool of employees with language capabilities”), was used by a superintendent David Wilkinson from Greater Manchester Police who in a letter written in early 2009 on the force’s then forthcoming moves to outsource, wrote:
“There must be a huge amount of ‘untapped’ interpreting skills in our immigrant communities”.
This is a really dangerous and lazy assumption and the best word for the belief of Superintendent Wilkinson is – even being kind – DELUDED.
Interpreters are professionals and there is no guarantee that FCO officials, who I must surely be right in assuming are largely based in London, are going to be competent legal interpreters. Furthermore, the interpreters the MOJ Framework Agreement concern are mainly court interpreters. There are frequent – daily – requirements, often at short notice, for Police forces the length and breadth of the country.
Juggling that with a full-time job is near-impossible. On that basis, I can’t see how FCO staff based in London can attend an arson victim in Manchester or child rape complainant required in Hull at 11pm on a Tuesday night. Not happening. I admire the idea in theory – but it’s not founded in reality.
One thing I will say is that there seems to be a massive amount of effort and lost sleep and hand-wringing to find a solution to that pesky problem of interpreting having to be a profession at all.
The public services and various others seem hell-bent on considering absolutely anything other than just allowing this profession to exist, get on with what it does best. They disrespect the profession by refusing point-blank to accept its importance, to simply recognise that alternatives fail. Instead, they come up with crackpot scheme after scheme to try and incorporate it into the work of professionals whose job it is not, or to bend the definition of what makes a person an interpreter.
The latter is exactly what the MOJ have done with this contract – they knew the real professionals held the ace card in having a gift, an ability that could not be replaced at the drop of a hat, so what did they do? Accept it with humility and deal with it? No – they moved the goalposts by diluting the definition of what an interpreter is.
Interpreting is a profession. It is done by interpreters. Trained people who do it as their primary profession, by and large. No matter how many police learn basic Urdu for communication door to door – while it may be a nice touch – interpreting to the degree that all of the twists and turns of a PACE interview, a crown court trial or a witness statement, are the job of trained, prepared professionals. The direction the contract has taken things in is the opposite one and your suggestion, while it comes from a place of respect and good intention, is no more likely to work than the present one.
[...] In 2010, the Ministry of Justice outsourced its courts translation work – but the contractor struggled, and the system ground to a halt. As the probation [...]
Dear Joshua Chambers,
I appreciate you writing this article, it is in the large part superb.
You describe the MOJ FWA as ‘improving’ – it isn’t. It’s as shambolic as ever.
Just today a solicitor in central London tweeted that two of his German-speaking clients had been remanded from Tuesday night after arrest at a sporting event to Friday morning.
German – I utterly despair! A search on the NRPSI website this morning dug up no less than six interpreters in London and six more in the SE of England.
Twelve available interpreters and often those interpreters would be willing to attend at short notice. For all I know, maybe whoever Capita TI could not supply in this major European language then resulted in direct calls going out from the court to find someone who would work direct.
The thing is, huge numbers of NRPSI interpreters won’t even work direct. They won’t work direct because if they cover jobs, they effectively cover for the contract’s massive failings. We don’t want a sticking plaster – we want the fetid gangrenous limb that is Capita to be chopped off for good.
German! In Central London – and the MOJ has the raw nerve to claim that the contact is improving despite the JSC’s damning report? Solicitors don’t tweet their frustration at nothing and there are colleagues of mine receiving calls from courts and police stations daily, plus not every frustrated solicitor or judge has a Twitter account. Take the ones who do as some straw poll indication of what is really going on out there.
MOJ: DELUDED and their dirty contract is indeed SHAMBOLIC, it was and it still is … and that’s being fair.
[...] In 2010, the Ministry of Justice outsourced its courts translation work – but the contractor struggled, and the system ground to a halt. As the probation [...]
There is, as yet, no hard evidence that outsourcing is more efficient or saves money – at its heart, outsourcing is a ideological fad!
Dear Joshua Chambers,
I appreciate you writing this article – it is in the large part superb.
You describe the MOJ FWA as ‘improving’ – I don’t think it is, I think it is as shambolic as ever.
Last week, a solicitor in central London tweeted that two of his German-speaking clients had been remanded from Tuesday night after arrest at a sporting event to Friday morning. It took until the weekend for them to be released and this came at a huge cost, as I can imagine you understand.
One of the elements that led to the MOJ deciding to try a different approach was a perception that some languages in some areas were in short supply and indeed, if you want a Portuguese interpreter in Carlisle at short notice, I’d imagine there isn’t a ready supply, but interpreters for that language do exist and albeit a wait is involved, they do attend.
How do I know? Because I am one. I’m based in Manchester and I did attend jobs in Carlisle where the reason I got jobs at all was that I was presumably the nearest available person at the time the need arose.
However … German in central London in a normal working midweek – not Christmas Day or New Year’s Eve but a Tuesday or Wednesday in February. I utterly despair!
I did a search on the NRPSI website last week and I dug up no less than six interpreters in London and six more in the SE of England. Twelve available interpreters.
Now, here’s the rub. Before the MOJ contract, I have no doubt whatsoever that just like Police calls at short notice that I used to receive for Spanish and Portuguese in Manchester and often further afield, one of those 12 interpreters in German based in striking distance of central London might have attended. I can’t speak for the specific stance of those 12 interpreters but figures released to my MP by one of the former MOJ ministers were that 301 members of the 2300-strong National Register of Public Service interpreters had signed up to the new contract. That’s one short of 2000 out of 2300 interpreters unwilling to sign up.
Of those who didn’t sign up, the stance among many is that by taking the scraps offered when the first port of call fails, they are papering over the contract’s many cracks in the places where it fails to deliver.
This, for all I know, could have been one of the many short-notice instances where staff have been told not to even bother with the supplier, Capita – which has been confirmed by the MOJ publicly – when a call is desperate. Direct calls have been authorised in some more pressing instances, which is laughable because the contract was supposed to improve supply, not make it more scarce.
Again – say it to yourself – German, a major European language in Central London – and the MOJ has the raw nerve to claim that the contact is improving despite the Justice Select Committee’s damning report?
Solicitors don’t tweet their frustration for the pure heck of it and there are colleagues of mine receiving calls from courts and police stations daily. Also, don’t forget, not every frustrated solicitor or judge has a Twitter account, so use those who do and who use them to be an interesting cross-section, a straw poll indication of what is really going on. The truth is out there.
Dear Victor,I didn’t mean to suggest that ALS is only based in NYC- my point was that you reererfd to you having the trademark , which you may hold in the US, but do not hold in Europe (to the best of my knowledge). The related point was that in the UK ALS is known to refer to Applied Language Solutions; whether we use it or not, that is the association that people will have. In a way, it is just as well for you to know this- you will not be able to change the fact that people in the UK will initially assume that ALS is Applied Language Solutions, but being aware of that means that you can address that point in any of your marketing, drawing a clear distinction & pointing out that you are not to be confused with the British company ALS.All the best,Richard