Legal professionals continue to mock hopeless Capita/ALS
Four months into the MoJ contract, concerns over quality of ALS (now Capita) services are still prevalent among legal professionals. We already wrote about a Crown Court judge branding the new system 'a disgrace' and a barrister claiming that it would be quicker for him to learn Czech than to wait for ALS to provide a Czech interpreter. Solicitor Sundeep Bhatia of Beaumonde Law Practice was the latest legal professional to join his colleagues. Addressing concerns over quality of ALS linguists, the Middlesex solicitor has tweeted last Monday: "At ALS all our Interpreters are expertly trained at the Allo Allo College of Hire Edukation". This comes after a number of reports of ALS offering court interpreting assignments to people with no interpreting qualifications or criminal record checks.
On the same day, further north in Lincolnshire, solicitor John Storer was more worried about his Lithuanian client's wellbeing after yet another ALS interpreter's English was deemed as not good enough by the court. This resulted in eventual adjournment of the case. Putting the word interpreter in quotation marks, the Boston solicitor tweeted "Lithuanian 'interpreter' sent away from court this morning as unable to speak English properly". His other case in the afternoon on the same day got adjourned and he tweeted "This afternoon's Lithuanian interpreter is a no-show! Case adjourned. Fortunately client on bail, not RIC. Still, he's lost a days wages".
