The current state of interpreting services in the courts is inefficient, ineffective and poses a risk to the administration of justice, peers declared today following an extensive inquiry. The government was urged to use a current procurement for language services contracts to reform the sector ‘or risk reinforcing significant jeopardy to justice for the foreseeable future’.

The House of Lords public services committee held evidence sessions last year with representative bodies, interpreters, contractors and government officials. Today’s highly critical report reveals a ‘clear disconnect between what the government hopes is happening, what the companies contracted to deliver the services believe is happening, and what frontline interpreters and legal professionals report is happening with interpreting services in the courts’.

Data-gathering by the Ministry of Justice is one cause of the disconnect, the report states. ‘The conflict between the reports of poor-quality interpreting in the courts, and the data published by the MoJ, suggest that significant issues with court interpreting may be being missed in the data the MoJ gathers, making it difficult for the MoJ or parliament to assess the scale and impact of problems in this system and the impact of these problems on access to justice.’ 

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Official data on complaints ‘significantly underrepresents the number of problems seen in the courts, due to low awareness, poor communication of the system, and cultural barriers among legal professionals’ and the people requiring interpreting services ‘face a language barrier submitting complaints’.

On interpreter pay, the current system ‘creates perverse incentives for court interpreters to work outside the main contracted system, due to issues with pay and terms and conditions’. Interpreters ‘lose significant amounts of money’ when cases are delayed or cancelled.

The committee says the government should publish data on the number and proportion of cases delayed to interpreting issues, make the complaints system accessible, and introduce minimum pay and commensurate cancellation rates for interpreters.

Today’s damning conclusions are unsurprising given the committee took the unusual step of urging the lord chancellor to halt the procurement process before it had published its final recommendations - a plea that was rebuffed.

Baroness Morris of Yardley, chair of the committee, said the current system for court interpreting ‘presents a significant risk of people suffering disadvantages during hearings because of language barriers, thus rendering the term “lost in translation” an unfortunate reality’.

 

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