Interpreting Services in the Courts (Public Services Committee Report)

Lord Sandhurst Excerpts

Tuesday 9th September 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Sandhurst (Con)]

My Lords, like others, I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, and congratulate her on her appointment. She brings much experience of the criminal justice system, and I am sure she will be invaluable to the ministry. I am grateful, too, for the compelling opening speech by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and to my noble friend Lord Blencathra for his illuminating exposition. Indeed, we have heard many powerful speeches.

The multicultural society in which we live contains individuals with myriad languages and dialects. More and more individuals need access to interpretation services in our courts. The use of those services grew by nearly 6% between 2023 and 2024. This presents challenges that the Ministry of Justice, as this report makes clear, has failed to address.

The Ministry of Justice’s most recent data shows that, comparing the last nine months of this Government against the previous Conservative Government, the proportion of unfulfilled requests for court interpreters has increased by just under 24%. Worryingly, in the same time, the number of complaints about inadequate standards has increased by 48%. I will come back to that. The Minister’s predecessor’s decision to ignore advice to pause the reprocurement process until after the committee had conducted a thorough review of court interpretation and quality assurance services was flawed.

It is very regrettable that those on the front line have a negative view of court interpretation services. The Magistrates’ Association rightly pointed out that inadequate interpretation can lead to miscarriages of justice—that should be obvious to us all—as defendants cannot properly understand the legal options open to them. I highlight the evidence of Dr Windle that far too many trial interpreters have qualifications equivalent to an A-level. That is simply hopeless. The profession must be staffed by sufficiently skilled, trusted and properly paid interpreters. The observations of the noble Baroness, Lady Warwick, in this respect are invaluable. The Government must listen, learn and adopt.

Even more alarming is the lacklustre quality-assurance framework. The company responsible for quality assurance conducts assessments by watching from public galleries, but interpreters in closed cases and family court sessions are shielded from accountability. The Ministry of Justice cannot in those circumstances be getting a true picture of quality. This report recommended that the assessment process should include access to whispered communications between defendants and advocates during trials. Such communication, as any practitioner knows, is integral to court proceedings. This important point was not addressed in the Government’s response and we on this side keenly await clarification.

Further, the report rightly pointed out the lack of transparency and the dearth of data available regarding the outcomes of the assessments of court interpreters. We do not know how many concerns regarding interpreters are escalated to judges, nor how many interpreters are removed from the ministry’s register. So the public cannot hold this important public service provider accountable, nor be confident that the rule of law is upheld consistently.

The Government responded by saying that they required longer to act on the recommendation to release this data—if at all. I emphasise that. This weak response must be seen as shirking accountability and hiding behind data privacy. Given the significance of interpretation quality for the delivery of justice, when will the Government commit to acting on this powerful report and what steps are they taking to ensure they are best equipped to do this?

The most direct recourse for users of interpretation services is access to a functional complaints procedure, not least because it is the practice to dismiss interpreters after they have incurred three complaints. It was therefore worrying to read that the process is not considered fit for purpose and that complaints, despite their sharp rise in recent months, appear grossly underreported. The report labelled awareness of the complaints system as “low”. That too is serious. If stakeholders—those involved—are not even aware of its existence, how can interpreters be held accountable? Worse, many of those aware of the complaints system cannot engage with it satisfactorily. It is available only in English or Welsh. I echo the report’s warning that this “must be urgently addressed”. Those most in need of help are least equipped to access it.

The Minister’s predecessor pledged to explore ways to increase awareness and methods of flagging complaints in the language of users. How exactly will the Government be doing this? They must outline the steps and methods being considered for a new complaints procedure that is accessible in different languages. As the noble Lord, Lord Marks, rightly said, the Government must abandon their complacent approach to these issues.

The problems are exacerbated by the striking disconnect between the Government’s stated view of their delivery quality and reality. The report highlighted this as an overarching theme of divergence between government and those on the front line. Despite overwhelming evidence, the Government are not confronting these problems. They must set out the precise additional steps they have taken and will take to ensure meaningful stakeholder engagement. Existing channels are insufficient. How will the Government resolve this information asymmetry? Otherwise, they risk wilful blindness to the true extent of the justice system’s challenges. The noble Lord, Lord Carter of Haslemere, made important points about data and information asymmetry.

It was a serious oversight on the ministry’s part not to pause the reprocurement process until after the committee’s findings had been reported to it. We are now in a position where the ministry has commenced retendering while unaware of the true quality and delivery of these services.

There are too many areas where the response does not go far enough. The Government must take further action to improve the quality of court interpretation services and reform their complaints system. If not, complaints will continue to soar. They must foster genuine engagement with legal professionals and front-line workers and listen to their concerns if they are to deliver justice for all.

Finally, I invite the Government to address and take seriously what the noble Lord, Lords Carter of Coles, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Burnett, a former Lord Chief Justice with great experience, had to say about the future use of voice recognition technology and translation software, at the very least for major languages. In that respect, of course, the ministry should also pay heed to the advice of the noble Lord, Lord Carter, and indeed the noble Baroness, Lady Coussins, and the thoughtful observations of my noble friend Lord Mott. There is a lot of expertise in this Room and the Government would be foolish to ignore it. The Minister has plenty to take away. We wish her well and we look forward to her reply.