The embarrassing court interpreter outsourcing saga continues. Courts minister Helen Grant repeats the same old mantra of ‘a dramatic improvement in the interpreter contract’.

Who says, exactly? The Ministry of Justice has in all conscience been asked this often enough. When its responses are shorn of Sir Humphrey-esque verbiage and doublespeak, the answer seems increasingly clear: Capita itself. Its reports and statistics, it is shrewdly suspected, are regurgitated uncritically by the ministry. After all, the MoJ keeps no statistics of its own; we have its word for that.

How convenient for Capita and its shareholders. It can, with relative impunity, assert that everything in the garden is lovely while we at the coalface know how absurd a claim that is. Here, I mean advocates, court personnel and the judiciary.

Malcolm Fowler, Dennings, Tipton