BBC: See Hear Interpreting Special

In the face of growing threat to the Sign Language Interpreting profession in the UK and the lack of access Deaf people are experiencing in the light of budget cuts, the BBC’s Deaf community programme, See Hear, has produced a special about Sign Language interpreting. Since 2010 the interpreting profession in the UK has been threatened with changing market forces, BSL agencies being squeezed out of that market and the subsequent loss of expertise. The changes have now filtered through to the rest of the UK with more devastating effects.

The programme features, in no particular order, an interview with me as owner of this blog; Kate Furby, an interpreter based in London; ASLI representatives: National Chair, Sarah Haynes and Working Group Chair, Bibi Lacey-Davidson; Paul Parsons from the NRCPD explaining interpreter registration and the complaints process; interpreting students from Wolverhampton University who are concerned about rising debts and whether they will be able to find work once they graduate; Terry Riley who is Chair of the British Deaf Association and feedback directly from the Deaf community talking about what they require from interpreters and their views on standards of interpreters.

Much of the focus is on a decrease in the standards of interpreters, the effect of one stop shop contracts with spoken language agencies and how community interpreting and Deaf access is in jeopardy by agencies’ use of unregistered, untrained signers.

The programme was first aired on Wednesday 23rd May on BBC2 at 1pm. It is available on the BBC’s iplayer until the 27th June 2012: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01j8chn/See_Hear_Series_32_Episode_8/

If you have any comments about the programme that you would like to share here please leave a comment on this blogpost. The effects of outsourcing have been affecting Deaf people’s access for over two years and interpreters are starting to leave the profession as some can not earn an income. The subsequent affects could make access even less likely. This is certainly an issue we all need to talk about more.

PIA Meeting for Interpreters: Why you should Join the Boycott

I attended the PIA (Professional Interpreters’Alliance) meeting today in Birmingham along with seven other Sign Language Interpreters. We made an interesting little cohort at the back and everyone was pleased to see us. It felt a little bit like we came to the party late but at least we had finally turned up. I’m going to join too as it is only a tenner.

There is much worth repeating here for the benefit of those that could not make it and perhaps for Sign Language Interpreters this will help in being able to make an informed choice about whether or not to boycott the MoJ’s contract for interpreting and translation awarded to ALS now owned by Capita.

Firstly there was a reminder about how far court interpreting had come and how this contract has returned us straight back to a time when interpreting did not have rigorous standards in place.  The case of Iqbal Begum was quoted. She was a Pakistani woman who since arriving in the UK had suffered a torrent of domestic violence at the hands of her husband. One day when she could take it no longer she hit him over the head with an iron bar and killed him. Having learnt little English, she required an interpreter. This was in 1981. She had only answered one question to say she understood the charge against her. She had pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced accordingly without understanding the term manslaughter. She served four years in jail before an appeal. The details of which were only released in 1991 after pressure from the local community in Birmingham.

Whilst trawling the internet I found news of two publications released in 2004 highlighting standards within interpreting: An Equality Handbook for Judges and a guide to commissioning excellent interpreting services published by CILT. A mere eight years later and they may as well have not been written.

We then heard how David Cameron whilst speaking to voluntary associations, before the Coalition government came to power, said in a speech that they would distance themselves from large companies, that ministers would be encouraged NOT to outsource but rather that they should be more innovative and award contracts to smaller companies. The CEO of Capita, Paul Pindar was said upon the news that the Conservatives were in power that this was a good opportunity for them. They have since increased their turnover by 17%  to £2.6 billion. That is £325 million in pre-tax profits.

We heard that many linguists have been out of pocket by the time they have travelled and paid for petrol on the payments they have received. One man was even more out of pocket after non-payment.

We heard how the previous system may not have been perfect (what system is?) but that at least there was a system: courts could book direct using the NRPSI register of interpreters who had been trained and assessed through the Institute of Linguists and where the courts and associated services adhered to the National Agreement which was in place. What we have now of course is one company who has become the regulator, the trainer and assessor (though not many ‘linguists’ seem to have gone through any assessment at all) and there are few standards being upheld. There are many stories of ALS personnel sitting in the dock and not speaking a word to the defendant. There is clearly no interpreting involved here.

Next up we discussed how interpreting associations have not suggested a boycott but rather informed their members of the information and options available to them. Judges and solicitors have reportedly been impressed by the will of court interpreters to continue the boycott. This is impressive when you realise that many have been without work for over three months since this contract begun. That is the strength with which they fight this contract and the refusal to be denigrated into accepting less and having their profession torn apart.

So what of the future? We were urged to contact our MPs, to get questions asked in the Houses of Parliament. FOI requests are being ignored and the excuse used is that there are no centrally held records. As the cost would be prohibitive in collecting the data the FOI can then be dismissed. Getting your MP to ask questions is the only way.

We talked about the figures due to be released by the MoJ on Thursday which will cover the first three months that the contract was in place to the 30^th April. Of course these are not the MoJ’s statistics. They are being collated by ALS. The stats are hardly likely to be unfavourable. How is that for public accountability?

The options for interpreters were discussed. As many now know, ALS are not filling this contract alone. Bookings are being farmed out to agencies (this is true in the case of Sign Language too with no less than four other agencies being handed out bookings, there maybe more).

Let us be clear, if you work for ANY agency doing a court (or police, or probation) booking you are helping this contract survive.

Courts are also now allowed to book interpreters direct. This is also true for Sign Language. There was much discussion about whether we should all boycott courts too. Although it is true that a contrast can be seen in quality when a properly trained and registered interpreter attends a booking it was whole-heartedly agreed that the boycott should continue.

The words that have been used are that this contract has created a ‘mixed economy’. It hasn’t. This contract is nothing more than a dangerous monopoly. Dangerous as it leaves a non-specialist in control of market conditions i.e. OUR terms and conditions. And do not think you are safe. In 2010 Sign Language Interpreters were hit by a tidal wave of outsourcing when the North West procurement hub handed over contracts to ALS thereby creating a local monopoly. Talk to any interpreter there and they will tell you what happened to standards, what happened to their terms and conditions.

What we had today was a room full of passionate interpreters who care about standards and access. Who have earned very little money in the last three months. Who understand that to work for this contract is to put nails in the proverbial coffin of our profession.

If you are a Sign Language Interpreter do not think you are safe. You are not. It is not that we are next, it has already happened. Our T&C’s are all ripe for the eroding now we have a monopoly and BSL and other spoken language agencies chomping at the bit to stay in business. One of whom stuck an unregistered signer in a courtroom.

Last week as I was a solicitors’ interpreter in court a BSL interpreter turned up for the first time. On the previous five occasions since this contract started… no interpreter. I could not bring myself to talk to her.

If you are an interpreter reading this, if you had been in that room today and you were aware of just what this contract has done, how the government has devalued interpreting, you saw the passion and commitment of the interpreters present and heard what the risks are of working for this company… No. You would be boycotting the framework agreement and any agency associated with the contract too.

When we resign ourselves to acceptance, do we desensitise ourselves to what is happening on the ground?

Have Interpreters resigned themselves to accept and even expect that level of access provided to the Deaf community, that they have trained to serve, to be as poor as it is in this current day?

I am not naive to the fact that the situation we find ourselves in today with ‘signers’ turning up to jobs parading themselves as Interpreters is anything new; it has been going on decades. However we are in 2012. We now have over 700 Registered Sign Language Interpreters (RSLIs) on the NRCPD register and many more Trainee (TI) and Junior Trainee Interpreters (JTIs) quickly following in their footsteps. Is it acceptable that at medical appointments people are still forced to accept ‘signers’ or worse still, use their parents, friends, children?

When the first video was published on Facebook from ASLI’s Professional & Consumers Working Group, urging the Deaf community to come forward with their stories of poor access to Healthcare, it did cause a stir in the Deaf community, but it wasn’t enough for people to come forward. It was perhaps that the Deaf community were just ‘used to’ the level of access they were being provided. Probably because in the areas where there is poor service, it is what they have received for years and so this has become expected. People have perhaps become resigned to their fate.

I believe that Interpreters may have resigned themselves to the same fate. We have become so used to hearing all these stories intermittently through our everyday working lives that we have become hardened to them. This may be a form of self-preservation, professional preservation even, but what does it achieve? The ‘signers’ are still out there, still taking on work, still causing upset and mayhem when they are unable to cope with the level of Sign Language or English used; and they are parading themselves as members of our profession. I’m sure we all agree that they are clearly not professional otherwise they would know and understand their limits and not take on such work in the first place.

But what are we doing about it? There are a few who are standing up to defend the profession, a few working on standards and awareness in an effort to prevent such harm, but a handful of 700 is hardly going to make waves. The ripples can only reach so far. If everyone sticks their head in the sand, or carries on thinking all is well because someone else is already fighting the cause, then we are not going to get very far.

We all need to do our bit, wear our NRCPD badges to EVERY job, even those regular bookings in that office we’ve been working in for years. Remind clients of the standard they should be expecting, so the next time they have a medical appointment they know to look out for the badge. It may even be an awareness exercise if someone had no knowledge of registration of Interpreters in the first place and just ‘liked your signing’; the excuse most often heard from ‘signers’ parading themselves as ‘good Interpreters’.

What will it take for the profession to unite and stand up for ourselves? Mistakes happen, they have been occurring for years. Are we not a large enough group of professionals now to make more noise about it and stand up for ourselves, the people we serve and prevent any more of a reduction in access and standards for the Deaf community?

Bibi Lacey-Davidson

Chair of the Professional & Consumers Working Group, ASLI

Using a Professional is the Only Safeguard – Part 2

This blog is part 2 of 2. Following on from part 1, where the term profession was discussed, let’s go back to why interpreting is being outsourced in the first place.

Services are being outsourced to save money. Services that are deemed as being a ‘Back Office Function’.

This phrase is being repeated by the Ministry of Justice, by commissioners nationwide, by Ministers and by David Cameron.

Back Office Function. What is a Back Office function? Logic dictates it is a function that exists back of house probably in an office. This would include administration, IT, facilities management, ordering of equipment say.

Any intelligent being would surely not class interpreting as a Back Office Function. No. Surely it is a specialism. To be done by people who know how to do so. People. Wait… professionals who have been trained and have experience before being let loose in a courtroom.

Interpreting as a Back Office Function? It’s illogical.  Outsourcing is now going way beyond what would normally be termed Back Office Functions.

Strange given the track record of disasters whenever the British government attempt to outsource. Capita got the name Crapita for good reason after disasters such as people nearly getting evicted when systems failed and did not pay out housing benefit claims in time. And bear in mind this is the company that has bought ALS and where the buck currently stops for interpreting services for the MoJ. As one publication has pointed out Capita should stick to back office business functions.

So why is the government taking the risk of outsourcing for areas others than more traditional business functions?

1) Crony capitalism.

This is endemic and epitomised in the coalition government’s support of big business over small or medium enterprises. This is despite what is touted in its reports. None of the framework agreements or procurement hubs now favoured by statutory organisations make it easy for the smaller enterprise to win contracts. Where the small enterprise is the specialist sign language agency, they lose out.

Sign Language interpreting services are becoming sub-contractors to the bigger spoken language agencies. Assignments are regularly being sub-sub-sub-contracted. By the time the interpreter is paid there is little left. Everyone up the food chain needs to make their buck. The result of which, at the other end, is that the statutory organisation comes away with little savings and interpreters travel the breadth of the country when there was a registered interpreter next door to the hospital sat at home unpaid.

2) Back door privatisation.

We have the Conservatives in government. They wish to privatise everything.

3) Ministers and senior civil servants need answers.

Outsourcing is an easy answer to coming up with savings rather than appropriately conducted research and consultation, with the caveat that information gleaned from consultation should be heeded. The word consultation has become a misnomer in the UK. It has come to mean you will speak up then be ignored.

Ministers have often said they lack skills in running large departments. One author suggests this is indicative of an eroded civil service with an overreliance on expensive consultants or specialist advisors rather than looking inward to creating those skills and utilising them.

As Peter Handcock CBE, Chief Executive, Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) before the Justice Select Committee said so eloquently:

“So it is partly the process of letting a new contract and putting it in place, but, but we need to do, frankly we need to do much much better understanding the potential risks before we roll these things out.”

An admission of the lack of understanding. Has the government taken any advice on the subject of interpreting services? It seems they have ignored much of what interpreters have been telling them through the various consultations.

Therein lies the explanation of why interpreting is now being seen as a Back Office Function. And what of the effect of this policy, why does it go so horribly wrong, especially where professions are concerned?

Unit costs get ever cheaper in the bidding war for a contract. Unless there are safeguards and standards in place enforced upon the contract provider the temptation is to employ the cheapest personnel and disregard quality.

Sign Language interpreters have seen it happen already in most NHS trusts around the country. Chaos caused by large scale employment of untrained interpreters by sub-standard agencies (usually spoken language ones, though some sign language specialist agencies are also to blame). Yet the NHS and the MoJ are paying for these services.

A colleague did some mystery shopping amongst some new agencies that had won NHS contracts in and around London. Scarily, they wanted to accept her on their books without checking any qualifications, any registration. They did not even ask for insurance or a police check. Some didn’t even care if she actually knew any sign language.

When contracts are awarded to these agencies, the provision of interpreters then becomes tokenism, paying lipservice to the Equality Act 2010. These are specialist services that are commissioned, monitored and evaluated by non-specialists without the necessary in built safeguards, which you would have if professionals were employed. Services commissioned from those that call themselves specialists but are not. Of course outsourcing interpreting services was bound to fail. And fail it has.

The government, local and national, has made a categoric error in outsourcing interpreting services across the public sector. With regard to the MoJ, when this is the kind of service you are paying for you are not saving £18 million. You are losing £300 million.

Interpreter Cost Cutting: A False Economy

In these times of fiscal belt tightening funds have to be cut. It’s a given. For statutory bodies it must be hard. So where does the funding get cut and how can they save money?

Cut the stationery budget. There will be fewer pens. Don’t provide sandwiches at meetings. Staff and visitors will feed themselves. Take away the water cooler. There’s a tap.

Say you’re a nurse or a doctor within an NHS trust. Or you are staff in a local authority, the police or the courts. How about trying the following options. What would happen if you did?

Don’t provide an interpreter:

We know the US has a more litigious culture. Here’s what happened there:

Failure to use an interpreter ended in a $71m malpractice lawsuit in the U.S where a Latino boy was suspected to be a drug user but actually had a brain aneurism. A late diagnosis left him a paraplegic.

£400k was awarded to a Deaf woman who was not afforded an American Sign Language Interpreter and could not understand the side effects of her Lupus medication.

Last year, a Sheriff was sued for keeping a Deaf man in custody for 25 days without an interpreter.

What about here in the UK?

In 2004, Mr Tran Quang Tung died at Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre. He hung himself. There was a continued lack of interpreters used by doctors and other members of staff even though they could have done due to systems that were in place.

In summary, a professional is breaking their own code of conduct if they cannot communicate with their patient or service user. Guesswork does not amount to being able to care, treat or diagnose them. Crossing your fingers will not work either. Primum non nocere is the benchmark of medical ethics: “First, do no harm”. If you are court staff, justice is unlikely to be achieved. Local authorities, you are not filing your statutory duty.

Use an unqualified or unregistered interpreter:

It is quicker and cheaper to get someone who you think can do the job but is not qualified or registered. Perhaps use someone’s spouse or another member of family?

In 2000, in an A&E department, the wife of a profoundly Deaf man, Sarwat Al-Assaf, was used to interpret questions to her husband such as do you have thoughts of harming your wife or children? Mr Al-Assaf was suffering from severe mental illness. He later went on to kill his wife’s new partner.

Perhaps you get someone who says they have some sign language qualifications or in the case of a spoken language get in, say, the Polish-speaking porter.

One interpreter points out that “The English translation for the word ‘hit’ in Punjabi and Hindi is ‘maar’, but it also means ‘to kill’,” she explains. “So if I’m in court I have to ask the person: are you saying ‘I’m gonna hit you’, or ‘I’m gonna kill you’?” You don’t want to mess around with that distinction, whether it’s in court, for the local authority or a medical appointment.

Every registered interpreter has a tale of how there was an ‘interpreter’ booked but they got called in a week later to sort out the mess, usually to find out that the ‘interpreter’ was someone unregistered who took the payment because they could. It is obvious that in these cases, the service provider has to pay out more. Like getting in a cowboy builder, it ends up costing twice as much to get the mess sorted out afterwards.

It is illegal to employ an unregistered nurse or doctor who will not have to adhere to a Code of Ethics. It is not yet illegal for an unregistered ‘interpreter’ to work as one. Still, it stands to reason that if you use someone who is untrained and unregistered there is no legal recourse when it all backfires as it did in the cases above.

Commission an agency to do it for you:

Perhaps you are an NHS trust, a council or the MoJ and your commissioners are responsible for purchasing interpreting provision. In times of financial austerity, commissioners of services generally tend to care more about costs than quality. In that case, allow them to award an agency a contract or framework agreement with built in standards to ensure quality but ultimately, said agency will not follow them. The agency can not, as it is too costly to get in the appropriate practitioners, i.e. registered interpreters. In order to win the contract, they had to go in too low. The unit costs, if too cheap, can not add up to someone who does the job right and in a professional manner.

So what do you end up with? See the first two options. Rather than not providing the interpreter or getting in someone who is untrained and unregistered, the agency will be doing that instead. You’ll still be paying for it anyway. Freedom of Information requests show agencies are charging the cost of a registered interpreter but not necessarily providing one.

Not much of a cost saving then. Unless the commissioner chose a reputable agency. They normally charge more though so the likelihood is the statutory organisation or commissioner did not make that choice.

The Solution:

Pay for a trained and registered interpreter to:

Avoid – malpractice, misdiagnosis, wasted time, wasted cost orders, being sued and the distress of those to whom you are supposed to be providing a service.

Ensure – you are abiding by the code of ethics of your profession, you are providing the service you are supposed to, you are getting value for money, and you are able to complain or simply to trust that the proper communication is taking place.

How to save money:

Book and pay for a trained and registered interpreter.

How to check if an interpreter, from an agency or one that is booked direct, is registered:

Check the interpreter’s name against the lists held by NRPSI (spoken languages) or NRCPD (sign language). On their arrival ask to see their ID card.

These registers have been in existence for a while for good reason. Avoid the cowboy, avoid the lawsuit, avoid paying out twice.

Interpreter Economics of Cartels and Price Fixing – Unionise or Unite?

In the last week, the previous blog post on Interpreter Price Wars sent a small flurry of comments into the inbox. A few days later someone posted a query on a Sign Language Interpreters e-group regarding price fixing. A few days after that an interesting post appeared from Street Leverage entitled: Should Sign Language Interpreters Unionize? Here follows a response:

Price fixing was an accusation many held about interpreters when the profession had years where supply and demand was in our favour. With only a few hundred interpreters in the market there was plenty of work to go around and those that were interpreting were the ones the Deaf community had decided were good enough.

Enter years of public interest in the profession, enter greater accessibility to basic BSL qualifications and a lack of understanding of the need for interpreter standards and registration, enter the creation of mainstream qualifications i.e. the dreaded NVQ.  It has served neither the interpreting profession nor Deaf people well. For every good NVQ Interpreting course, with additional teaching and high standards, there are two more who churn out candidates at lower standards for profit or even to supply an interpreting agency linked to the owners of the course.

Enter an economic crisis, enter government cuts, enter outsourcing and bring on a smidgen of the Fear i.e. will I be able to cover my mortgage this month and should I just accept that job for less fees? A handful of agencies in these market conditions jumped on a chance to dramatically cut prices of suppliers i.e. interpreters. In this way they were acting as a implicit cartel. We now have a market where the effects of an Oligopoly have been stimulated. How? Think of the market where there are a few big agencies holding numerous contracts in one local area. Or one large agency holding what is effectively a sole provider contract for a government contract, whether this is locally or nationally.

Illegal price fixing and anti-competitive behaviour is hard to prove though not impossible. The solution for many suppliers is to join a union. In the UK think farmer’s milk prices and Tesco. The National Farmers Union helped to make their story a success. Beware bad press: the Telegraph reported at the time of those horrible farmers increasing prices.

So how do Interpreters resolve the current issues in their market? Unionise or not? For many having a union is unpopular for the same points Antonio details in his post for Street Leverage.

He concludes that perhaps other methods are more suitable and uses the example of the Writers Guild of America who have organised strikes repeatedly throughout their history causing in 2007-08 chaos for American TV. Sign Language Interpreters in the UK could feasibly do this. The easier and perhaps less organised way is for interpreters to simply not drop their fees. But can we do this without a greater unity?

He points out that in the US they have RID and other organisations. Here in the UK we have three organisations for interpreters or those who may work as interpreters (moot point) plus a registration body. There used to be a one membership body and one for registration. It was easier then and we were more co-ordinated as a profession. It would be easier if this were the case now. In the field of spoken language interpreting, especially public service interpreting, there are just too many organisations. Try looking up ITI, CIoL, SPSI, PIA, NUPIT alongside the Say No to ALS and No to Peanuts campaigns. There has been some great work done in getting questions discussed in parliament. Ultimately this work would be a lot more powerful were there less confusion and more unity. Strength in numbers as it were.

Antonio raises other questions which can be tailored for the UK:

How can we talk about unionising to increase awareness and an understanding of market forces in our profession?

What workshops do we need to provide to empower interpreters to run themselves as businesses earning reasonable fees and enabling them to stay in the profession?

How do we reach the increasing number of interpreters who are not part of any organisation and do not understand the effects their actions may have on the wider profession?

What other gaps in the profession are there that we need to consider and resolve?

If you have the answers or would like to respond please leave a comment below. There will be much more to say on this topic…