£30,000 Every Day: What Translation Services Cost London Police
The Metropolitan Police spend £30,000 every day — over £10 million per year — on translation services for the more than 300 languages which are now spoken in the capital, new figures have shown.
In the rest of England and Wales, an additional £15 million is spent every year on translation services. This presents the taxpayer with a total bill of around £25 million per year — enough to pay for more than 650 full time police officers.
The languages which Scotland Yard has to cater for include Urdu, Slovak, Russian, Portuguese, Czech, Bulgarian, Arabic, Farsi, Kurdish, Lithuanian, Polish, Punjab, Romanian, and Gujarati.
Immigration has resulted in London now having over 50 distinct communities. To cope with this influx, Martin Tiplady, the Metropolitan Police’s Director of Human Resources, recently forecast that language translation services will rise to £20 million by 2012.
The Metropolitan Police has seen its translation costs grow by 45 percent over the past four years.
A recent article in the Public Service Review journal said that the Metropolitan Police would soon launch a £5.6 million programme to provide officers with linguistic skills, video links for police stations, a new computer system to allocate translators and new software to identify spoken languages.
* According to police figures, 255 non-British citizens from 71 different countries were charged with rape in London last year.
* In 2007, Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire Police Julie Spence announced that she needed more officers and resources to cope with the growing influx of migrant workers. Officers are confronted with over 100 different languages in the county of Cambridgeshire on a daily basis, she said.
* The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that at least 2.4 million people living in London were born outside of Britain — the vast majority from the Third World. This figure does not include the second or third generation children of immigrants.
In September last year, figures released by the Department for Children, Schools and Families showed that white British-born children are now a minority in large numbers of schools in London.
In Tower Hamlets, only 15 percent of primary school pupils are classed as white British. In Newham, just under 12 percent of primary school pupils are white British, while the figure in Brent’s secondary schools is seven percent.
Outside London, areas with the highest concentrations of ethnic minority pupils included Bradford, where 47 percent of the primary school children are classed as “ethnic minority.”
