MoJ

There are 28 posts tagged MoJ (this is page 4 of 14).

One Year on: The Ministry of Justice's Failed Interpreting Contract

The latest on the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) contract, which is approaching its one year anniversary, is that the contract holders, Capita are still hanging on. From 8th January the travel costs are being slashed to 20p per mile. Travel costs were the only benefit for people accepting a job as a ‘linguist’ (their term for an untrained interpreter and insulting to real linguists). There are already grumblings.
Any clued-up interpreter knew this was due to happen and it is why the boycott has been admirably sustained by all those that are professionals and know their worth. Here follows a summary of what has happened over the last year:

  • Key interpreter organisations object to a monopoly contract and point out what should be the minimum standards as already set up in the National Agreement.
  • ALS awarded contract by promising unsustainable savings despite protests.
  • ALS offers interpreters greatly reduced payments for working in courts.
  • Professional interpreters refuse to work under these conditions for ludicrously low payments.
  • The courts are thrown into chaos with many bookings unfilled and courts experiencing many adjournments and delays.
  • Bonuses are paid to entice anyone to accept work (£5 extra for accepting an online booking) and mileage and payments are increased to entice ‘linguists’ to court.
  • Untrained, unqualified speakers of other languages, sometimes those who do not even speak the languages they say they do, start to work for the contract.
  • Reports are numerous amongst interpreters and reach the UK media of linguists travelling miles to rack up travel payments.
  • Courts continue to experience severe delays.
  • Capita takes over ALS and pays £7.5 million and invests a further £5.4 million.
  • Several ALS and Capita personnel leave including ex-Chief Executive Gavin Wheeldon.
  • Parliamentary hearings confirm what everybody knew: the contract holders know nothing about interpreting or the standards that were put in place before the contract removed them.
  • From instructions set out by the Public Accounts Committee, Capita start to CRB check the ‘linguists’ registered on its database, check whether they actually have qualifications and start to tighten up checks. These were fairly non-existent until this point.
  • A year after the contract starts mileage rates slashed to 20p per mile and effort is made to find local personnel, the contract promised that interpreters would be sourced from within a 25 mile radius, but with the payments originally offered this did not happen.

The next chapter in this story will surely be that no-one will work for Capita at the proposed rates. £16 – £22 per hour for a court job, with many being classed at the £16 per hour level – if someone paid out more than they were allowed to claim and travelled far to attend a job, Capita’s so-called linguists would be working for less than the minimum wage. The MoJ surely could not expect professionals for those prices and professionals it does not get. The courts have seen a parade of second-jobbers standing in for professional interpreters including hotel staff walking out of courts before hearings are finished to get back to their real jobs, reports of mis-interpretations abound and ‘linguists’ who do not speak their stated languages.
Capita’s website reveals no mention of standards, of registration (NRPSI or NRCPD), of minimum levels of qualifications, of CRB checks, Codes of Conduct or professional indemnity insurance. The only word they use is ‘qualified’. In what exactly, it is not clear. Perhaps anything other than languages or even interpreting, going by the personnel they are still sending to courts.
And what of Sign Language Interpreting? The contract has changed the face of interpreting mainly due to how the booking system works. The Capita monopoly just does not work. With patches of evidence of lowered standards in place it ticks over, many afraid to report bad practice due to confidentiality. More job requests are issued directly from courts and are being farmed out to agencies who have never been heard of and who may never have booked a Sign Language Interpreter. Worrying as they will not be aware of our standards of registration. With no monitoring of the contract by the MoJ this leaves us in a risky situation that has already seen influent sign language users, who are not yet registered interpreters, working in courts, despite promises by the MoJ.
There no longer seems to be a preferred supplier as the jobs that are released by Capita go out to a myriad of sign language interpreting agencies and some spoken language ones. Let us remember whenever there is a monopoly situation, the larger company inevitably uses competition between sub-contractors to drive the price down. We have seen this with another large spoken language agency and their numerous public service contracts leaving us in a situation where the least experienced interpreters are doing jobs that should be done by the most experienced such as mental health, child protection and probation.
In the courts it has been reported that some newly registered interpreters are accepting court or police work, often without any additional training. Why? Some agencies like to reassure interpreters they are capable. Less scrupulous agencies will tell an interpreter anything to fill the job. It is not their decision whether an interpreter should do the job but it is up to the interpreter in question. This practice by agencies has happened for years but newer interpreters are left ever more vulnerable by a changed economic landscape and an unwillingness to pay for support networks such as ASLI. This is how many of us learned to be professionals and to see ourselves as a collective. Let us all remind ourselves of the NRCPD’s Code of Conduct for competence: You must recognise and work within the limits of your competence, and if necessary, refer on to another proficient professional.
Although there are still experienced court interpreters working for Capita. Many are not or state they are experienced but actually are not up to the job. One of the most important skills a court interpreter should have is an ability to monitor their own output and enter into discussions about their work. If you see bad practice in courts please report it to the NRCPD. Often the Deaf clients, if vulnerable, will not be able to do so. It is our duty.
Stories abound of clients not understanding court interpreters. Perhaps interpreters are not insisting on Deaf relay interpreters when it is needed, perhaps when one is not present they do not have the skills to deliver the court proceedings in a way that the Deaf people present will understand something, no matter what their level of language or conceptual understanding. Court work is often not the same as working with a Deaf person who has such good language skills that even if you are not that good an interpreter they will do the processing for you whilst you sign something vaguely relevant to what is going on.
One reader of this blog reports: One client stated they had not understood the interpreters in court and she did not know what she had been there for, what the charge was and what the outcome of the proceedings were. When pressed by the solicitor she could not answer. The interpreter states they interpreted in more or less international sign as this was not a native user of BSL. Her companion eventually stated the charge, that she was found guilty but had not yet been sentenced.
Unfortunately this is more common than it used to be. Will our situation get worse if we too are subjected to a further drop in terms and conditions? Capita will be looking to make savings somewhere as they can not drop the rates of spoken language interpreters any more than they have. With a flat rate of £34 per hour that is not a margin that screams profit, especially not when they are being subjected to wasted costs orders by judges. With no mention of standards of BSL/English interpreting stated presumably they are covered to send anyone who can pick up their hands and pretend, much like the linguists who speak Bulgarian but interpret in Russian and which ever language they can get away with.
This is not access to justice for Deaf people and especially not for speakers of other languages. The British justice system is often seen as the fairest in the world. Just not anymore if you speak another language.

Parliament, Capita and the decline in standards of BSL Interpreting in Courts

The transcripts are all out for the three parliamentary hearings: the first by the Justice Select Committee (JSC), the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), then the second JSC hearing. They follow the National Audit Office’s report.
What do we know now? Not much is new if you have been following the contract since January. What we have seen throughout the hearings is ministers and other government personnel attempting to defend their actions or lack of them. We also saw Gavin Wheeldon (ex-owner of ALS) still accusing interpreters of intimidation. Funny seeing how in reality it was the other way round, attempting to bully interpreters into less than the minimum wage. His legal team also threatened this blog with legal action. The government are still defending the contract even though the hearings clearly expose a lack of due diligence in awarding the contract, ignorance of a basic knowledge of interpreting including procedures that should have been in place for vetting and assessments and a complete lack of monitoring. This includes not allowing court staff to give the hearing figures they know will highlight delays, wasted costs and a failing of this contract.
There seems to be some allowance for what is now Capita Interpreting and Translation to get their act together although the boycott is a strong as ever. It is not clear how they will fulfil the contract when they check everyone registered with them has qualifications, as directed, and they have none.
The Capita machine rumbles on. They have bought Reliance who provide interpreters to Sussex Police. With these types of investments it looks like Capita will not be backing out of this contract even if it costs them to fix what, perhaps, they did not know was wrong. They have their fingers in the interpreting industry pie and are too big to get burnt. The share price even went down recently due to suspected lower profit margins in the public sector. Capita report they will still have an ‘organic’ 3% increase in profits this year.
What do we know about BSL interpreting under the contract? More interpreters have been on court training, more are being approached to work in courts regardless of level of experience outside of courts. Another two agencies are putting out court bookings who have never done so before. It used to be the case that generally the safest and best interpreters worked in courts. Now it is anyone registered (and some who aren’t). Deaf professionals who work in and outside of court report a denigration of standards and witnessing interpreters who do not know how to make the language accessible for some of their clients, especially the more vulnerable or people with minimal or idiosyncratic use of sign language. Some interpreters are still working for the contract and hang on doggedly to the argument that it is better to have some experienced people in court and show the government how it is done. That would either be naivety or self interest. The government is not interested and neither are the companies it outsources too. It takes voting with your feet. It has been said on this blog before: if BSL interpreters had boycotted this contract it would have failed within weeks.
In the meantime the contract is not going away so there should be some following of some unwritten rules (and some written ones):
Do not accept court work until you have been registered for three years and you are willing to pay for shadowing and mentoring in order to be safe.
Do not do police work before you have six months worth of experience in court. It all starts at the police station and if you make mistakes there you risk the whole case and thousands of pounds of tax payers’ money.
Do not accept work for which you are not capable of doing (regardless of whether you think you have because you have been on a two day training course. This only gives you knowledge and not necessarily the skills or experience to work in courts).
Ask your colleagues to monitor you and give you feedback. There should be a rule in court that every interpreter, for solicitor, barrister or court, monitors the working interpreter and flags up errors. I have had many conversations with experienced court interpreters who note that the role of the solicitor or barrister’s interpreter is misunderstood. You need to be good enough to monitor the court interpreter and confident enough to flag up those errors following the protocols of a court room. Even the court interpreting team should be monitoring each other, feeding each other and discussing their interpreting in breaks. This is especially true during evidence where you should be monitoring the way questions are interpreted as well as the response and how it is interpreted back into English. If you are not willing to accept feedback and enter into open discussions about your work, you should not be anywhere near a courtroom. Even if you have been working for courts for a while.
If you see an interpreter working in courts who does not have the appropriate skill level, whether you are a professional attending court, a Deaf person involved in the court process or another interpreter please inform them of your observations. If you need to, put in a complaint to the NRCPD. Interpreters who decide to work in courts should do so on the understanding that being subjected to a complaint is a reality. Not enough people are complaining about interpreters as they feel it breaks confidentiality. It does not. The complaint stays with the panel and those who already know the details of the situation. It is about time we all signed up to a certain level of transparency.
Lastly, read through the hearing transcripts. Do you really want to work in courts and be associated with this mess? Do you want to be responsible for a Deaf client not receiving access to justice? Or will you insist you are fine to work in a court and be like the interpreter who cost a 63 year old man £10k? Not only do you have your reputation at stake but the knowledge you are contributing to a wider continuation of a decline in interpreting standards and our terms and conditions.