a lot to do in my last day as Chairman... One thing I really wanted to do was let you see my presentation to the EU Commission/DG Translation/Spanish Ministry guys. There is a full PowerPoint presentation too, let me know if youd like to see a copy. So here goes: A presentation made by G Buckingham, Chairman of the APCI and member of the EULITA Executive Committee at a conference on the transposition of Directive 2010/64/EU of the European Parliament, held in Madrid, Spain, on 17 October 2014, organised by DG Translation of the EU Commission. “Outsourcing: from confrontation to influencing outcomes” Firstly I must thank DG Translation and Carmen Zamorano for the invitation to speak at this conference. The subject matter is a huge one, and if I went into detail, we would be here for many hours. So I shall have to assume a measure of foreknowledge on your part so as to avoid lengthy explanations. The deadline for transposition of the Directive was 27 October 2013, yet on 7 November that year only 8 Member States had communicated their national execution measures, despite benefiting from three years rather than the usual two for transposition. There is a compelling volume of evidence that not only is the UK not compliant with the letter or the spirit of the Directive, but that this failure is deliberately camouflaged. This is explained by the Ministry of Justice’s public insistence that their Framework Agreement is compliant when the opposite is true and many hundreds of failures to supply and manage the contract have been documented. Not once has the contractor ever achieved, let alone exceeded supply targets as defined under the contract’s Key Performance Indicators . At the same time, complaints have spiralled to many thousands. Now we have the situation where Directors of the contractor are summoned to court regularly by judges to explain their failure, and many judges have made public statements in court which demonstrate the depth of the contractor’s failure. Let me give you a recent example. On the very day I received the invitation to speak here, 28 July 2014, an article was published by the Law Society Gazette, the foremost legal news publication in the UK who said this: The headline read; “Defence told to trawl Chinatown for interpreter”, and the article went on, “A Crown court judge asked a defence barrister to trawl the Chinese restaurants of Cardiff to find an interpreter after the company contracted to provide translators failed to do so on two occasions.” Similarly Judge Munby, head of the Family Division at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, branded arrangements for providing court interpreters ‘unacceptable’ after he was forced to abandon a final adoption hearing as no one attended to translate for Slovak-speaking parents. In handing down his comments in open court, Judge Munby said, “The contractual arrangements between [the contractor] and the interpreters it provides do not give [them] the ability to require that any particular interpreter accepts any particular assignment or even to honour any engagement which the interpreter has accepted.” Then, highlighting the late notice given to courts if bookings are cancelled, Munby said, “It is only at 2pm on the day before the hearing that [they notify] the court that there is no interpreter assigned.” The Law Society Gazette went on to say, “The third point was the ‘revelation’ that on the day of the hearing Capita had only 29 suitably qualified Slovak interpreters on its books for court hearings that day and only 13 within a 100-mile radius of the Royal Courts of Justice. The number was insufficient to enable the company to provide 39 Slovak interpreters requested by courts on that date, Munby said.” The UK Ministry of Justice is adamant that the Court system is compliant with the Directive. On 9 July 2013 Lord McNally, then the Justice Minister in the House of Lords, stated, “the Government will take the steps necessary to ensure that the UK is compliant with the EU directive in good time for its implementation date” , and went on, “I do not think we are in danger of non-compliance. […] there are some months to go before the directive comes into play […] the Ministry of Justice has a massive interest in making sure that Applied Language Solutions provides the quality and service for which it is contracted.” It is not possible to ask him how he reconciles such statements with the evidence we have already seen, since he resigned on 18 December last year. There is a pattern of Ministers in the MoJ getting moved along after a short tenure; you barely know their name before they’ve gone, often sinking into obscurity – we are on our third Minister in 4 years - but only after spouting the same mendacious litany as their predecessors. The National Audit Office has so far prepared two reports on this Framework Agreement, and each has been highly critical. Both were commissioned by the powerful Parliamentary Committee for Public Accounts. During one hearing Margaret Hodge, Chairman of the Committee observed that the MoJ was “an unintelligent customer”. In a statement dated 12 November last year, she said, “I asked the NAO to carry out this work after looking at case after case of contract failure […] In each case we found poor service; poor value for money; and government departments completely out of their depth.” The Justice Select Committee has held further hearings and demanded a parliamentary debate. I was able to attend and witnessed speaker after speaker, seven or eight MPs in total, stand and pull the FWA to pieces. Unusually, there was not a single speaker in its support save the minister responsible, then Helen Grant, subsequently demoted. And all she was able to do was repeat the vagaries, half-truths and mendacity handed to her by her civil service advisors. Her speech did not take long and was greeted with derision by all present. Andy Slaughter, shadow Minister of Justice, commenting after the Welsh Mandarin interpreter failure said; “David Camerons mishandling of our court translators & interpreters system is dangerous, expensive and farcical,” and “[It is] time to drop the half-baked privatisation and outsourcing going on at MoJ under [the present Secretary of State] Grayling.” In researching the measures taken by the UK in respect of transposition of the Directive for this paper I went to several sources, and found a number of references in EUR-LEX. Don’t worry – I shall not be analysing them all. But I am able to assist with one of them, since I was involved in it. In fact I wrote the suggested amendments for PACE, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984). This I think has been mistranslated in the list as the “Criminal Procedure and Evidence Act”. In summer 2013, as part of the transposition process, the Home Office issued a consultation for stakeholders regarding proposed changes to PACE codes of practice C and H, which aim to implement the Directive, and specifically the “Notes for Guidance, 13A”. With input from others, I drafted arguments where we stated, among other things, that we were very concerned to see “the inclusion of the Ministry of Justice Framework Agreement as an example of services provided that satisfy the requirements of the Directive”, and even worse, “the deletion of the sentence stating that wherever possible, interpreters should be provided in accordance with national arrangements approved or prescribed by the Secretary of State.” We explained that failure to achieve the required standards result in many unwanted outcomes – from costly delays to miscarriages of justice. We said the reputation of British Justice would be seriously tarnished. Initially they agreed, but on 21 October we were notified that the final amendment meant that the Home Office had decided to ignore everything they had been told. HOWEVER, no battle is ever fully lost. We have been successful in persuading a number of police constabularies that it was in their best interest not to sign up to the Framework Agreement, and the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) dropped its support for it entirely. We read in the published accounts of the contractor for 2012, that the contractor states that the contract is “onerous”. In other words they will make no profit from it. More recent anecdotal news is that substantial numbers of linguists are abandoning working for the contractor, which is resorting to sub-contracting assignments to smaller, local agencies. Naturally, payments to interpreters are reduced. This ensures that the quality of service deliver is also reduced. The contractor can still say the job has been filled, which makes their statistics look good. Be in no doubt, this contract has been a failure for everyone. It is a catastrophic failure for the UK’s global reputation for delivering Justice. It is a failure for the client, the MoJ, at many levels, it is a failure for the contractor who is making a loss. It is a failure for the linguists they employ, who are unable to make a living. It is a failure for defendants, witnesses and victims. Access to Justice has been removed from them. It would be easy to walk away and just allow chaos to rule, but the Association of Police and Court Interpreters will not do that. Justice is too important. So we continue to engage with the issues. We continue to have a sort of dialogue with the Ministry of Justice. After almost a year of delay, the Ministry commissioned an independent assessment as to the quality of delivery under the Framework as demanded by Parliament in January 2013. The original date for publication was the end of December 2013. The date was put back to March, and on 3 October I and other representatives met with the Ministry to discuss a draft, still not published. Undertakings of confidentiality constrain me from saying anything further. In the spring of 2014 Crown Commercial Services, or CCS, published advance notice of a new Framework Agreement. CCS reports to the Cabinet Office, to the Cabinet Minister himself, the Rt Hon Frances Maud MP. The Executive Director of the National Register of Public Service Interpreters and I were invited to a suppliers day organised by CCS, and subsequently he also attended a stakeholders day. The situation is still fluid, but membership organisations and our independent regulator are at least involved in the process. There are many issues to be thought through, but at least we are involved to a point even though there has not yet been any proper consultation. There are one two items of encouraging news. Firstly, the current Framework ends on 18 August next year. There are indications that the Ministry will not be going down the route of a single monopoly supplier again, and may even look at joining the CCS Framework. They have told us they are keeping a close eye on it, and if it succeeds they may be open to persuasion. You can see therefore that it is in all interests for us to make great efforts to ensure the CCS project succeeds. The QUALITAS project has produced a helpful summary of the current situation , which mentions the National Register in some detail, and it specifies at least one recognised qualification to practice in the LIT field. However, it describes the “nosedive” in the quality of service provision to the courts, a position reinforced by the three volumes of the Dossier of Failures, or Dossier of Shame, as it is more widely known. I have copies here, and a few USB drives with them. If you’d like a copy, please help yourselves. It was recently disclosed that over 2012 and 2013 there were around 50 complaints against members of the National Register. Over the same period there were more than 12,300 complaints made against the Framework contractor. You have to ask whom you would prefer as a source of interpreters. In conclusion, we find ourselves in a strange position. On the one hand the Ministry of Justice claims it is compliant with the Directive. On the other we have a continuous and depressing record of failure to reach agreed targets, massive ancillary costs and many thousands of complaints. There is an imbalance here. Firstly, my view is that the Directive could tighten up in a few areas which might assist. It could define what makes an interpreter rather than someone who happens to speak more than one language. Secondly, it is to be hoped that others will learn from the MoJFWA catastrophe. How? 1. Consult the experts. That means the practitioners through their membership organisations. Listen to what they have to say. Consult external experts such as EULITA. This will save you money. 2. Outsourcing does not save money. Its allure is superficial. 3. Establish an Independent Regulator such as the UK’s flagship National Register. Only an independent regulator will preserve standards. 4. All LITs MUST have a recognised professional qualification. This will protect you as well as other parties. Thank you for listening.
Posted on: Sun, 19 Oct 2014 13:28:33 +0000
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