West Midlands Police spends £1.5m on interpreters

Around £1.5 million has been spent by West Midlands Police on interpreters each year since 2011, it has been revealed.

Figures showed that face-to-face and telephone conversations with interpreters as well as other translation services for suspects, victims and witnesses set the force back £4.35 million from 2011/12 to 2013/14.

The force has predicted a further £1.45 million will have been spent by the end of the current financial year.

More than 100 languages have had to be translated during that period.

They included major languages such as French and Spanish as well as little-spoken tongues that are used in remote parts of Africa and Asia.

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West Midlands Police said the cost of interpreters 'reflects the increasing diversities of the communities we serve'.

The force has had to make cuts of £126 million since 2010 but chiefs insisted interpreter costs did not even make up half of one per cent of its budget.

Superintendent Karl Fellows said: "As such, we are regularly required to call upon professional interpreting and translation services, the cost of which represented just 0.2 per cent of our total budget for the last financial year.

"However, we are working hard to reduce expenditure across the board and we continue to benefit from interpretation and translation cost savings, which were made possible by contracting-out services in 2011.

"By doing this, we have streamlined the administration process around interpreters resulting in cost reductions: between 2007 and 2010 we spent around £2.25m a year on language services, yet our projected expenditure for 2014/15 is much lower at around £1.45m."

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Bosses revealed they are hopeful of embarking on a 'groundbreaking' initiative to train local unemployed people - often migrants - to become interpreters to cut down on costs.

The idea, which was said to be the brainchild of a member of staff who managed interpreting contracts, is those chosen will already have knowledge of more than one language.

Supt Fellows said: "We are also liaising with Capita Translation and Interpreting, who provide us with interpreters, on a pioneering project to see if local unemployed people with identified language skills can be trained to become interpreters, thus increasing the available pool of linguists and further reducing our costs."