Mark Wallace of the Taxpayers Alliance says councils are perpetuating the problem of people not speaking English.
It is a standard PR tactic in local government to blame everything on Whitehall. To be fair to councils, often many things are the fault of central government. Sometimes, though, there are clear issues where waste occurs purely due to flawed local decision making.
One such issue is the absurd practice of translating council documents into dozens of languages at huge cost. A new report released this week revealed that the total cost is now almost £20m a year for translating a wide variety of documents in 75 different languages.
This is a ridiculous situation. Of course, with a large number of business visitors, tourists and temporary migrants, there will always be some need for translation in the public sector. But that should clearly be focused in the kind of services that are required in emergencies rather than across the whole gamut of council services.
By all means the police, ambulance service, fire brigade and social services should have access to translators, but is it really necessary for Manchester City Council to translate advice booklets on how to feed pigeons into Urdu or for Warwickshire County Council to produce “Weight Busters” leaflets in Gujerati?
Given the remarkably low readership of even those council documents which are produced in English, it is hard to imagine that most of the translated copies produced are ever even used. This is clearly a tremendous waste of money.
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