County council secures £16k costs order against Capita over interpreter failures
The President of the Family Division has ordered Capita to pay a local authority nearly £16,000 following the company's repeated failure to provide interpreters for an adoption case and a dispute over costs.
The background to the case was that applications by a father and mother for leave to oppose the making of adoption orders in relation to their two children had been listed before Sir James Munby on 7 May 2014. The parents were Roma from the Slovak Republic.
However, the hearing was unable to proceed because – despite an order by a judge at Canterbury County Court and HMCTS going through the correct booking procedures with Capita Translation and Interpreting – no interpreter was present.
Capita has had the Ministry for Justice contract for providing interpreting services since it took over ALS in 2012.
Kent County Council sought an order against the company for their costs of the abortive hearing on 7 May.
The local authority drew attention to how on six separate occasions previously there had been issues with Capita’s ability to provide interpreters.
These problems included situations where no interpreter showed up, where only one of the two interpeters required was present, and where one of the interpreters was only able to translate Slovak "very slowly".
In Capita Translation and Interpreting Ltd [2015] EWFC 5 the Family President called the situation a “truly lamentable state of affairs”.
In an earlier ruling, explaining why the 7 May hearing could not have proceeded, he said it would have been “unjust, inhumane” to continue with the final hearing of the applications – the parents’ last opportunity to prevent the adoption of their children – if the parents were unable to understand what was being said.
Sir James said he agreed with counsel for Kent that there had been serial failures by Capita in the case against a background of wider systemic problems.
The President added that – “applying the standard identified by Morritt LJ in the Globe case and Cobb J in B v B, and having regard to the principles of general application to be drawn from the ALS case” – it was just in all the circumstances to make the order sought by the council.
The judge emphasised that he had reached this decision on the facts of the particular case. “I am not to be understood as suggesting that Capita will be liable for each and every failure to provide an interpreter,” he stressed.
“The ALS case is clear authority against any such proposition. Nor am I to be understood as suggesting that Capita will be liable for each and every failure to provide a Slovak interpreter, lamentable though its failures to provide such interpreters were in this particular case and, seemingly, more generally. Everything will depend upon the precise circumstances of the particular case.”
The President added that it should not be be assumed that a similar liability would extend to other private-sector contractors whose failures can impact adversely upon the court sitting-day, “for example, the companies responsible for producing prisoners at court or the companies responsible for the maintenance of court buildings”.
Sir James ordered Capita to pay £4,207.46 in costs to Kent for the hearing on 7 May 2014. This excluded those costs which would have been incurred by the council in any event for the hearing that subsequently took place on 15 May.
The President also ordered the company to pay £11,719.90 to Kent over the application for a costs order.
Sir James rejected Capita’s request for permission to appeal, saying the decision whether to grant permission was properly one for the Court of Appeal.
