Courts: Translation Services
(asked on 1st July 2019) - View Source
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate he has made of the (a) number of court cases rescheduled due to problems with interpreting or translating services and (b) additional cost incurred from that rescheduling in each of the last three years.
The Ministry does not hold central data for all jurisdictions and hearing types in which interpreters are used and to manually review each case would incur disproportionate costs. However, central information does exist on the number of trials listed in the criminal courts which were adjourned as a result of interpreters being unavailable. This data is published in Criminal Court Statistics.
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/criminal-court-statistics
A table detailing such occurrences over the last three years for which data is available is copied below.
| Crown Courts | Magistrates’ Courts | ||||
Year | Number of trials | Adjourned due to interpreter availability | % of trials adjourned due to interpreter availability | Number of trials | Adjourned due to interpreter availability | % of trials adjourned due to interpreter availability |
2016 | 37,339 | 30 | 0.1% | 149,423 | 495 | 0.3% |
2017 | 34,579 | 29 | 0.1% | 136,962 | 423 | 0.3% |
2018 | 29,583 | 17 | 0.1% | 123,023 | 495 | 0.4% |
As the associated costs for HMCTS of rescheduling trial cases will vary, depending on whether other work was able to be heard in that courtroom, this information is not held centrally.
The department continues to monitor its language service contracts closely and work with the suppliers to drive improvements and reduce the cost on the taxpayer. The Language Service contract has achieved a fulfilment rate of 97% over the first quarter of 2019.