The latest instalment of the largest interpreting contract ever awarded in the UK and its disastrous consequences:
As a result of the Justice Committee Report last year Capita announced that from 1st May rates would be raised for:
Cancellations – an interpreter, rather than receiving nothing previously, will be paid £21 for a cancellation of up to 24 hours. This includes multi-day bookings.
A mileage payment of £0.20 (twenty pence per mile) for the entire distance travelled per assignment including the first ten miles (which was not paid previously).
The minimum payment of one hour is unchanged: £16 for a tier 3 interpreter. (check!!). Extra payments will be made for 15 minute blocks which amount to an extra 7 minutes pay or £2.56.
An incidental fee of £7.50 to cover any additional costs. In Capita’s announcement there was no explanation to what this may cover and when it would be paid.
In a parliamentary announcement by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), it was stated that these incentives would increase the take home pay of interpreters by 22% but the feeling is too little, too late.
How have this incentives been paid for? From savings of £16.7 million the MoJ have stated they are reinvesting £2.9 million back into the contract. This neither makes sense nor is practical. Were the contract working it would not need further investment by the MoJ. Essentially this is taxpayers’ savings that are being reinvested, except the supposed savings still do not add up when you factor in the costs of delays, adjournments and mistrials. One figure suggests it costs £110 per minute to run a courtroom with a jury. Any interpreter delay, and there are many, makes a mockery out the purported savings.
Has this reinvestment worked so far? Quite simply, no. Direct calls from courts to interpreters with training, i.e. NRPSI registered interpreters still remains high. This is the true indication of the appalling nature of awarding a contract via a competitive bidding process where the lowest bidder wins regardless of quality. Capita are only filling 80% of bookings when the contract target is 98%. Still MoJ is not dishing out penalties and courts are filing few wasted costs orders. It seems that when it comes to this contract, Capita can do what it likes.
The interpreting contract is now 18 months in and whilst this mess has continued, lawyers are now in the firing line. The MoJ has proposed price-competitive tendering (PCT) for legal aid work, the ultimate aim of which is to slash budgets along with consumer choice and quality of work.
Where are British Sign Language Interpreters in all of this? Reports suggest one agency involved is attempting to slash rates even further despite original recommendations. Key personnel have left leaving court work more bereft of the most skilled and those doing the work are, also reportedly, not the best anymore. With no consistency in how BSL interpreters wish to move forward, NRPSI interpreters and campaigns are left without little representation from us. Meanwhile government decisions effecting NRPSI are having a knock on effect on BSL interpreters with many of us being none the wiser. It is time we took more notice of what is going on in the wider field of interpreting as it affects us all.
Recent Commons debate on 20th June 2013
Analysis and comment from spoken language interpreters
MoJ
There are 14 posts filed in MoJ (this is page 3 of 7).
Privatising the Police
You may not have noticed but there were some elections last week. The Conservatives have brought in Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) to replace Police Authorities. PCCs are publicly elected to hold Chief Constables to account and the new PCCs were elected in 41 areas, 37 in England and 4 in Wales. No PCCs were elected in Scotland, Northern Ireland and London due to different governing procedures.
In an initiative supposedly brought in to increase local democracy, £100 million was spent yet the turnout was as low as 1 in 10 in some areas. At one polling station in Newport, Wales, there were no voters.
Why is this important for interpreting? Although the main aim of PCCs will be to reduce crime they will also be attempting to reduce ‘waste’, the catch-all Conservative term for spending. ‘Waste’ will inevitably include interpreting and translation. Any police force who has managed to escape the disastrous Ministry of Justice contract, a system that is more inefficient and wasteful than the previous, may not last much longer. Another criticism is that PCCs will politicise police forces. In Hertfordshire, Conservative candidate, David Lloyd won and was the only candidate to support outsourcing. The rest held a much more sensible view.
If Chief Constables were under extreme pressure before, that may have just got a whole lot worse. We may now see even more parts of police forces outsourced and auctioned off to the lowest bidder. David Cameron stated that the “turnout was always going to be low, when you’re electing a new post for the first time…” That is not a legitimate reason when in an election understood and supported by voters the turn out would have been higher. The media has called into question whether these posts are therefore even legitimate.
If you want to dispute the elections write to the party leaders online and write to your new PCC and explain why interpreting should not be outsourced causing a further privatisation of our police forces and putting users of interpreting services at risk.