Interpreters cost taxpayer £180m
Police are spending huge amounts of money on translators to communicate with foreign language-speaking criminals, suspects and witnesses
People in Britain who cannot speak English have cost the taxpayer almost £180m in interpreters over the past three years. Some police interpreters are earning more than £100,000 a year.
According to figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, £70m was spent by the police communicating with criminals, suspects and witnesses.
Despite government cutbacks, some interpreters are using a scam called “stacking” to overcharge the police.
Dominic Raab, the Conservative MP for Esher and Walton who obtained the figures, said they reinforced the need for people coming to this country to make more effort to learn English.
“The enormous expense of translation in delivering public services highlights the hidden costs of uncontrolled immigration,” Raab said.
“It strengthens the case for the government’s language requirements, both to save taxpayers’ money but also to promote community cohesion.”
The “stacking” dodge involves interpreters understating the time it takes to get to a police station so they can book as many jobs as possible.
They receive a minimum payment of £60 for attending, about £20 an hour travelling to the job and travel expenses of up to 35.7p a mile. The fees mount up even faster if they can time jobs so they qualify for extra overtime and payments for unsociable hours.
One interpreter, who asked not to be identified, said: “Let’s say you are at a job at one police station but you get a phone call for another job.
“You can’t be there for at least 2½ hours but you say an hour and a half because that puts them on the spot.
“They can’t find someone else that quickly so you stack the jobs. If you do that at night you get paid time and a half. Some days it’s double time.”
West Midlands police are one of several forces trying to stop the practice and predicts it could almost halve the annual bill of £1.8m.
In an effort to cut the costs of interpreters used in courts, the Ministry of Justice has ended an agreement that paid them a minimum of £85 for the first three hours, regardless of how long they were needed, and £30 an hour after that. From the end of this month, courts will hire interpreters through a private contractor that pays £22 an hour. This is expected to save £18m.
Nick Rosenthal, chairman of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting, said: “Effective and experienced professionals will no longer be able to afford to carry out this vital work in the public sector.”
The National Health Service has spent £39.7m on translation services in the past three years. Barts and the London NHS trust spent £2.2m on an in-house team of 25 “patient advocates” who speak Bengali, Somali, Turkish, Gujarati and Urdu.
The trust also works with imams to persuade elderly Muslims that they should take their medication during the fasting month of Ramadan.
It said: “We were tending to find that people who were on cancer treatment were holding back all of their medication until the evening and taking it all in one go, which actually makes them very ill.”
Spending on translation peaked in 2006 when annual costs reached £100m. A push by ministers to rein in spending led to that figure falling to £59m last year.
