What kind of monitoring is this?
I have just read this:
"The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has no central records on the number or cost of court delays or adjournments which are caused by the late attendance or non-attendance of interpreters. In order to provide an estimate of additional costs incurred because of a shortage of interpreters, if any, extensive inquiries would need to be made in relation to each court list since the new interpreter contract was implemented on 1 February 2012 and this would incur disproportionate cost."
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2012-03-15a.99941.h
Do my eyes deceive me, or is the Solicitor General really telling us that the MoJ will not gather this information on the grounds of cost? And to what would that cost be disproportionate - the cost of keeping suspects in custody for extended periods, perhaps? Reimbursing solicitors for wasted time? Ferrying defendants to and from court? How can the MoJ claim to be "right across this" and monitoring ALS's performance closely if it won't even try to calculate these key indicators, and where is the public accounting transparency?
If I remember rightly, the government recently claimed that ALS had increased its fulfilment rate to around 90%. Where did that figure come from if central records of non-attendances aren't being kept - from ALS itself?