£23m LOST IN TRANSLATION!

Courts blowing cash on crime suspects

OFFICIALS are spending £500,000 a week on translators and interpreters for foreign-speakers caught up in Britain’s legal system.

Most of the cash goes on helping crime suspects who are involved in trial proceedings.

Ministry of Justice figures revealed that the service has cost £23.4million in 2019/20 – up 9% on the previous year.

Services were provided for 143 different languages from Afrikaans to Zulu.

Much of the money went on helping Polish, Lithuanian and Romanian speakers.

But there were also big spends on Bengali, Punjabi and Urdu.

The service, paid for by the Ministry of Justice, even provided translation for three different versions of Creole at a cost of £23,000.

A total of £1,000 was spent on Bravanese, a language spoken in Somalia, and £20,000 on Oromo, which is spoken in parts of Ethiopia.

There was £42,000 spent on providing interpreters for Welsh speakers and £2,500 on Edo, which is a regional dialect in Nigeria. James Roberts, political director of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, pictured below, said: “Taxpayers will be lost for words to hear the bill for translations has once again gone up.

“There will always be some cases where a translator is needed to give everyone a fair shot at justice.

“But those who live in Britain should learn to speak English so that they are not a continuing burden on taxpayers.”

In 2013 the Ministry of Justice was branded “shambolic” by MPS for the way it handled the outsourcing of language services. One MP said that the MOJ “did not have an adequate understanding of the needs of courts”.

The Commons justice committee said some interpreters failed to turn up, leading to cancelled trials, while others mistranslated evidence.

When the contract was with Capita the firm was blamed for a total of 2,524 trials being halted because an interpreter had failed to show. In 2016 the contract was moved to two different firms.