'Self-serving' interpreter figures slammed
The shadow justice minister has criticised as ‘self-serving’ performance data released on the company contracted to provide court interpreters. The data, published by the Ministry of Justice last week, revealed that hundreds of cases were still being disrupted by a shortage of interpreters three months into the contract.
Applied Language Solutions took over the provision of interpreters to courts in February under a contract which aims to cut costs by a third. Members of several groups representing professional interpreters are refusing to work with the Capita-owned company.
The performance data reveal that from 30 January to 30 April Applied provided an interpreter in 81% of the cases where courts requested one. Its performance target was 98%. There were 26,059 requests for interpreters at courts and tribunals in England and Wales, covering 142 languages in the period.
Overall ‘fulfilment’ rate for requests increased from 65% in February to 90% in April, with success rates varying between 58-95% for the 20 most requested languages.
The figures were given to the MoJ by Applied, and verified by ‘spot checks’ carried out by the courts service, the MoJ said.
Andy Slaughter (pictured) said this week that the figures were ‘substantially self-serving’. Even so, he added, they indicate ‘meltdown’ from day one, and show that hundreds of hearings are still being disrupted. He said the figures failed to quantify knock-on costs of the failures to provide interpreters: ‘In some incidences, where people have been detained unnecessarily in custody overnight or where Crown court trials have been adjourned, those costs could run into thousands of pounds.’
An MoJ spokesman said: ‘We have seen a significant and sustained improvement in performance. We continue to monitor the improvement on a daily basis.’
Comments
The MOJ continue to speak
The MOJ continue to speak about how they have improved.
NOT GOOD ENOUGH AND I AM NO MUG.
HOW DARE BLUNT ET AL THINK THEY CAN HOODWINK ME! OUTRAGEOUS
The use of the word "significant" in the MoJ's spokesman's declaration of "significant and sustained improvement" is nothing short of rubbish, bunkum and tripe.
Tell me Mr MoJ, by what measure do you deem your "improvements" to be significant? They are not significant in terms of improvement unless you quote the target you were aiming at. The target WE know the FWA must reach is a long way off, and the MoJ is wasting MY MONEY AND THAT OF ALL TAXPAYERS.
Blunt the Funt had better beware. This is not over. It is only just the start. Blunt and your Baboon, watch out, keep your wits about you, you are nearly over. Tata
Manipulation and ommission
These statistics have been manipulated in a shocking manner to provide headline figures for the press that are a less bad than the reality. Let us examine one such statistic - the overall "success rate" of 81%...
ALS's fulfilment rate is shown as 72%, so how do they turn that into 81%? Well you add 0.1% of requests when the ALS interpreter was present but the "Customer Did Not Attend" and then you take the 11% so-called "Customer Cancellations" out of the calculation. Well it's not ALS's fault if the customer cancelled, is it? So, it wouldn't be fair to include them in the total requests, would it?
Well… the clue is on page 10 of the report "Requests may also fail because… the supplier… does not attend (or arrives so late that the job is cancelled)." If the interpreter arrives so late that the court can no longer proceed, that is by any normal person's standards an ALS failure, hence those requests should be included in the total number of requests for interpreters when calculating the "success rate".
I suspect that a large number of ALS failures are hidden in these so-called "Customer cancellations" because the rate of cancellation seems very high at 11%. In my experience the only type of court that has a very high interpreter cancellation rate is an Employment Tribunal as the parties often settle prior to a hearing. However Employment Tribunal cancellations are only 3% of the total cancellations, so how does one explain the rest? Sometimes postponement of a hearing will lead to an interpreter cancellation in advance, but it's not that frequent. Certainly the cancellation rate of 17% or 863 Immigration & Asylum Tribunals appears extremely high. I have interpreted at quite a number of IAT cases and I can't recall a single booking being cancelled in 4 years.
Clearly the real "success rate" should be closer to 72% than the 81% headline i.e. 26 percentage points short of the 98% target!
So that is one example of the way in which these statistics have been manipulated, but a more fundamental issue is that the MOJ is only revealing the requests going through ALS's system. To get a true picture of "the use of language services in courts and tribunals" (the report's title) they would need to include all the interpreting jobs which were not even passed to ALS. I know there were a significant number of Tribunals jobs pre-booked in January and the low level of requests for February shown in these statistics bears that out. We also know that after a fortnight of operation of this Framework Agreement the MOJ decreed that all next day Magistrates' Court cases and urgent Immigration & Asylum cases were to be booked via the previous arrangements. If this were taken into account, how low would ALS's % fulfilment fall?
Finally, the most important thing about this report is all the statistics that are missing.
There is not a single figure giving information about the tiers of interpreters used. Perhaps it is now convenient to forget about quality in relation to the Framework Agreement?
The Key Performance Indicators are all missing… Could that be because not a single one has been achieved?
The reality is that the whole policy behind the Framework Agreement is an abject failure and a proper evaluation would reveal very poor stewardship of both the public interest and the public purse.
MOJ statistics: intentional obfuscation
I have been looking further at the statistics released by the MOJ on 24 May. As well as the report and supporting tables with their dubious "success rates" (see "MOJ statistics: manipulation and omission"), the MOJ Chief Statistician released a text file of record-level data.
This file contains the data for the 26,059 language service requests on which all the tables and statistics are based… well, not quite.
The raw data has been doctored to make independent analysis difficult: 4,446 records - 17% of the total - have had the "Language" applicable suppressed and replaced by "Not disclosed".
The notes provided with the record-level data state that this has been done "to protect the privacy of individuals" for any instances where there is only one interpreting request for a single combination of court, month and language.
This "justification" doesn't bear examination. First and foremost - there is no data relating to individuals included in the data set. How does the fact that a specific court (or group of courts) had a language service request which was fulfilled, not fulfilled or cancelled in a particular month impact on any individual's privacy? It should be borne in mind that this data is being provided one to three months after the event. In any case, the interpreter's identity in any specific case is not secret - the vast majority of court hearings are open to the public and the interpreter will commonly give his or her name to the judge in open court.
So what does this restriction achieve? It makes many additional analyses of the data either incomplete or impossible. In particular it would assist in covering up high failure rates in certain languages.
For example, say I wanted to calculate the "fulfilment rate" for Tamil, as opposed to the dubious "success rate" shown in Table 2. By summing data from Tables 8, 9 and 14, I can calculate that there were 621 requests for Tamil in total, but the record-level data contains only 541 records for Tamil i.e. 80 requests or 13% of the Tamil data is hidden in "Not disclosed", so full analysis is impossible.
The situation for Lithuanian, Vietnamese and Latvian is even worse because these languages are not included in Table 14, so there is no way of knowing how many requests there were in total for each of these languages i.e. we don't even know what % is hidden in "Not disclosed".
Even for very frequently used languages such as Polish the "Not disclosed" category has a significant impact. I wanted to look at the figures for Polish for my Region, the North West, but the number of Polish records concealed in "Not disclosed", which can't be allocated to a Region - 310 - is greater than the 239 Polish requests definitely associated with the North West!
I fail to see any justification whatsoever for restricting the record-level data in this fashion. The only persons protected by this obfuscation are Gavin Wheeldon and Crispin Blunt and those who are desperate to fly in the face of the evidence and maintain that the Framework Agreement is a success.