Soaring numbers of foreign criminals in Britain’s courts has seen taxpayer spending on translators soar to as much as £152,000 a day.
The huge costs come despite a number of scams and scandals involving interpreters and concern about their effectiveness.
Former Tory leader, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, on Sunday night urged the government to cut back the ‘unsustainable’ costs and branded court translation services ‘woefully poor, expensive and massively open to fraud’.
In 2024, the total spent on court translators in England and Wales alone reached £38.6m – up 80pc on the £21.4m spent in 2020.
And partial data for just the first three quarters of last year indicates the figure could rise further still.
Between January and September 2025, £17.7m was spent UK-wide on translators for the top 10 languages alone, which were mostly Eastern European, Middle Eastern and South Asian.
In the whole of the previous year, £16.2m was spent on the top 10 languages.
The 2024 figure represents a 13-fold increase in a little over a decade, with an average of £11,437 spent a day between 2005 and 2011.
Translators are called upon to interpret proceedings for defendants, witnesses and victims whose first language is not English.
Mr Duncan Smith said: ‘These costs are unsustainable and need cutting back.
‘The government needs to reform the translator service. It is woefully poor, expensive and massively open to fraud.
‘We should also be worried about the spiralling numbers of recent migrants who are now being prosecuted for crimes committed in the UK.’
Last year, a House of Lords report criticised interpreting services in the courts as inefficient, ineffective and poses a risk to the administration of justice.
Peers highlighted ‘reports of poor-quality interpreting in the courts’ and urged the government to reform the sector ‘or risk reinforcing significant jeopardy to justice for the foreseeable future’.
They found a ‘clear disconnect between what the government hopes is happening, what the companies contracted to deliver the services believe is happening, and what frontline interpreters and legal professionals report is happening with interpreting services in the courts’.
In 2021, a fake court interpreter was let off with a suspended sentence for translating evidence in over 140 cases before being exposed.
Mirwais Patang, then 27, worked for contracting giant Capita, despite forging his qualifications, stealing a legitimate court interpreter’s identify and having a friend pose as him in court.
He earned at least £65,500 between March 2012 and August 2016.
Issues with time sheets for a grooming gang trial exposed his lies.
In another case, a translator who worked for the justice system for 16 years was found in 2019 to be in the pay of a drugs gang.
Kim Tran, 49, was jailed for 12 months after trying to trick a court into believing a defendant in a £1m cannabis cultivation case was a child when she was not.
Separately, solicitor Babita Attra worked on a scam which saw her partner Alexandru Major, 35, win contracts to translate legal aid documents for defendants who could not understand English.
But the word counts and costs of the work were inflated to cheat the Legal Aid Agency (LAA) out of at least £62,889.64 between March 2016 and February 2017.
When they were sentenced in 2020, Major was jailed for three years, while Attra was given a two year prison term, suspended for two years, with 150 hours unpaid work.
The huge increases in spending on court translators in England and Wales between 2020 and 2024 were revealed by a minister in answer to a parliamentary question by Independent Leicester South MP Shockat Adam.
The figures, revealed by Courts and Legal Services Minister Sarah Sackman, show a total of £155.8m was spent between 2020 and 2024, averaging £31.16m per year.
A break down into yearly figures shows how the annual total rocketed from £21.4 million in 2020 to £27.2 million in 2021, £31.7 million in 2022, £36.9 million in 2023 and £38.6 million in 2024.
There were 254 working days in 2024 – a leap year – meaning total spending that year averaged £151,900 per day.
The 2025 partial figures came from a separate Freedom of Information request and indicate that the total spending could rise higher still.
The same FOI data also showed how full-year spending on interpreters for the top 10 languages alone stood at £16.2m in 2024, £15.9m in 2023, £14.25m in 2022, £12.55m in 2021 and £10.3m in 2020.
Last year, the 10 languages which required the highest spending on translators were Romanian, Polish, Arabic, Albanian, Urdu, Kurdish, Punjabi, Portuguese, Bengali and Lithuanian.
The cost of interpreting Albanian in court rocketed from £800,000 in 2020 to £2m in 2024, while there was a similar rise in the cost of Kurdish translators from £600,000 to £1.6m in the same period.
Polish and Romanian remained the most interpreted languages throughout the 5 year period, costing the state almost £30m altogether.
In her answer to Mr Adam, Ms Sackman said four companies were contracted to provide translation services but that spending also included ‘off contract’ requirements arising ‘at short notice and those that are more challenging to fulfil, such as the requirement for languages that are rare or scarce, and as such are more expensive to source’.
She pledged new contracts would provide better value for taxpayers, adding: ‘The next generation of contracts, currently being procured, includes the use of a secondary supplier of interpreters, specifically to source those short notice bookings, and to bring this spend on-contract, with benefits such as improved data and value for money.’
