Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps she is taking to ensure the adequacy of services provided by interpreters to her Department.

Answered by Sarah Sackman - Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)

The Ministry of Justice operates a robust performance and quality regime for these services. Interpreter fulfilment of bookings is the service provided by suppliers under contract, and their performance is managed through contract management. The quality regime includes ensuring that interpreters on the Ministry of Justice register are qualified and security vetted, a rolling programme of spot checks on interpreters to ensure that they are meeting the quality requirements, and a complaints process that will direct quality assessment checks to interpreters that are subject to a complaint.

The suppliers forecast demand, and work to ensure that there is a pool of qualified interpreters available to the Ministry of Justice to fulfil our bookings.

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if she will make an assessment of the potential merits of replacing external (a) translation and (b) interpretation services provided to her Department with services provided by departmental staff.

Answered by Sarah Sackman - Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)

The Ministry of Justice considered the potential for bringing the service fully or partially in-house when assessing its options. The outcome of the assessment indicated an outsourced model continued to be the best value for taxpayers’ money, taking account of quality, deliverability, and cost.

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the total cost to the public purse was for the Ministry of Justice Language Service Contract in (a) 2018 and (b) 2023.

Answered by Mike Freer

The total cost to the public purse for the Ministry of Justice Language Service Contract was £26,774,286.01 in 2018, and £24,992,225.55 in 2023.