Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many cases in the (a) family, (b) criminal and (c) civil courts have required a translator or interpreter in each of the last ten years; and what the average length of time for cases in the (i) family, (ii) criminal and (iii) civil courts requiring translation or interpretation services was in each of the last ten years.

(a)(b)(c) Data is published concerning the ‘number and rate of completed language interpreter and translation services requests in the United Kingdom’.

The latest published figures cover the period to June 2019 and are available back to 2013, when the initial contracts were put in place. This data is published in Criminal Court Statistics overview table L1.

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/criminal-court-statistics

Our most recent statistics show the total number of language service requests are at their highest level since the new contract was introduced in 2016 and the vast majority of these – 97% - were fulfilled.

(i)(ii)(iii) The Ministry of Justice does not centrally collate the data requested and it is not possible to separately identify cases requiring translation from overall case counts or from data used to calculate timeliness estimates. This information may be held on court records, however, obtaining it would be of disproportionate costs.