I received this email, which has been anonymised for obvious reasons:
> Under the FOI act I asked all the police forces in Britain how much
> they spent in interpreters and translations.
> Below you will see the responses I've got.
> Unless it's specified,all the figures are fot the year 2007/08.
> Please note the huge amounts spent by the UK Border Agency and the
> Metropolitan Police.
> Also you will see some figures for the previous years,so you can
> notice how much this cost increased in the last years.
>
> CLeveland Police 113,120 (08)
>
> Dorset Police 201,900
>
> Hampshire constabulary 523,724
>
> Central Scotland police 52,423
>
> Essex Police 519,886
>
> Avon & Somerset Police 470,523
>
> West Mercia Police 386,223
>
> Bedfordshire Police 340,916 (08)
>
> Humberside police 361,168
>
> Norfolk Constabulary 238,598
>
> Hertfordshire Police 371,065
>
> Dumfrics & Galloway constabulary 14,578
>
> North Wales Police 162,554 (07/08) - 43,886 (03)
>
> Gwent police 127,724 (08)
>
> Tayside Police 42,561
>
> Nottinghamshire Police 321,652
>
> West Midlands Police 2,284,594
>
> West Yorkshire Police 1,278,000
>
> Strathclyde Police 228,290 (07/08) - 85,325 (03/04)
>
> Devon & Cornwall Constabulary 281,609 (07/08) - 32,000 (1999/2000)
>
> British Transport Police 210,538
>
> Cambridgeshire Constabulary 540,509
>
> Durham Police 66,117 (08)
>
> Thames Valley Police 1,082,082 (07/08) - 871,466 (05/06)
>
> Grampian Police 58,770
>
> Derbyshire Constabulary 319,324 51 languages interpreted
>
> Northamptonshire Police 324,758
>
> Wiltshire COnstabulary 294,170 (08)
>
> UK Border Agency 9,901,000
>
> Cumbria Police 88,073
>
> Warwickshire Police 159,253
>
> Cheshire police 77,500
>
> Northumbria Police 242,762
>
> North Yorkshire Police 183,523 (07/08) - 38,600 (03/04)
>
> Lothian & Borders Police 157,233
>
> Sussex police 102,881
>
> Northern police 23,947
>
> Fife Constabulary 39,152
>
> Greater manchester police 1,100,000
>
> Metropolitan Police 9,965,486
>
> Police Service northern Irealand 613,613 (07/08) - 74,993 (04/05)
>
> Gloucestershire Police 152,155
>
> Surrey police 325,323 (07/08) - 195,481 (03/04)
>
> Lancashire police 355,336
>
> Suffolk Police 258,596 (08)
>
> South Yorkshire police 649,913 (08)
>
> Leicestershire Police 373,157
>
> Staffordshire police 282,559
>
> Total £ 36,268,858
>
> If you add £3,650,667 spent by the department of work & pension and
> the £ 32,568,334 spent by the NHS you can be glad to know that £
> 72,487,879 of your money is wasted in interpreters and translations.
I was curious about this and spent some time digging into this and this is what I responded:
I am not sure that all this money is wasted. Foreign language expertise is required for a variety of reasons by the police officers. If you map the spend to tourist hotspots, you will see where the challenge is coming from. Assisting tourists in trouble. So we need to adjust this spend for the tourists who are spending their valuable tourist dollars in the UK.
Then we have a significant proportion of interpreting and translating requirements which emerge from the crown prosecution service. We have quite a lot of foreign corporate, criminal and civil cases which are executed across the world and have a British component. Hence the spend there is quite justified.
Then we need foreign language skills for crime fighting. Like it or not, we do have international crime syndicates, or non English speaking crime links, both demand and supply side ends in England. We need our police to have those skills to make sure that they fight crime. Then comes intelligence, counter terrorism and counter insurgency operations, again which requires a huge lump of foreign language skills.
No doubt quite a lot of spend is wasted on say illegal immigrants or even British citizens who cannot speak the language properly, but I wouldn’t say all the spend is wasted. Just take tourism, it’s the 8th most important industry in our country. As a comparison, the British Tourist Board just gets funded to the amount of about 35 million pounds. Here are some facts and figures
http://www.tourismtrade.org.uk/MarketIntelligenceResearch/KeyTourismFacts.asp
Quite remarkable, eh? Compared to the £16 billion spent by the tourists to the UK, I think the numbers look a bit more reasonable. We had 32.8 million visitors in 2007, one pound per visitor on translation costs roughly? What do you think?
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