Thursday 25 April  2013 by Catherine Baksi

The  Ministry of Justice today announced measures which it said would  increase the take-home pay of interpreters in a bid to improve the  quality of the service to courts and the justice sector.

In a written statement responding to the House of Commons Justice  Committee’s critical report on the contract with Capita Translation and  Interpreting (formerly Applied Language Solutions), Helen Grant  (pictured), courts minister, announced contract changes that she said  ‘will have a direct impact on the take-home pay for interpreters’.

She said the changes address concerns that interpreters have raised with the department and Capita.

They include paying interpreters at their qualified tier and in  15-minute blocks, extending the use of mileage payments and introducing  cancellation fees where the hearing is cancelled or runs significantly  shorter than expected through no fault of the interpreter, as well as  the introduction of a fee to cover ‘incidental costs’ that the  interpreter might incur.

The changes will come into effect next month.

The MoJ awarded the central contract to Applied in August 2011, weeks  before the company was acquired by Capita, on the basis of price – its  tender was the cheapest by £50m.

The Gazettefirst reported in February 2012 that the new arrangements were causing problems for courts, partly because interpreters were refusing to work for new terms.

The MoJ could not immediately say whether the bill for the additional  payments would be footed by the contractor or the taxpayer.

However in her statement Grant said: ‘We are confident that these  measures are affordable for the taxpayer, but will also have a direct  effect on performance levels by attracting more interpreters to register  to work, as well as encourage those already registered to undertake  more bookings.’

Grant said there had been a ‘dramatic improvement’ in the interpreter  contract since the initial problems at the start of last year. She  added: ‘Following constructive meetings with interpreters and the  contractor we are now putting in place changes to drive further  improvement.’

In February the justice committee published a report that questioned whether the contract was ‘financially sustainable’.

Figures released by the MoJ earlier this month showed that the a  since the contract started, Capita had failed to reach its performance  target, and that the performance actually worsened in January after Capita cut fees paid to interpreters.