In 2023, the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration inspected asylum casework. The report came out in April 2024. Over a hundred pages. Most coverage focused on backlog and processing failure. Almost nobody focused on interpretation.
I read it. Here is what it says.
The scale of the problem
Between February and November 2023, requests to the Home Office's Interpreter and Language Services Unit increased by 200%. By late October, over 3,000 interpreter booking requests were being made every week. Staff told inspectors this was causing burnout and more cancellations.
Of 70,013 asylum interviews booked between January and October 2023, nearly 19% were not completed through cancellations, suspensions, and claimant no-shows. Staff told inspectors that 40% of cancelled interviews were due to interpreter issues. The Home Office had no data to confirm or deny this figure.
Sit with that. Nearly one in five booked interviews was not completed. Staff blamed interpreters for many cancellations. The Home Office could not confirm or deny it because it had not collected the data.
What the inspectors found
Stakeholders and people with lived experience raised interpreter quality again and again. English proficiency. Accuracy at speed. Failure to render what claimants actually said.
Dialect mismatch kept appearing. Arabic speakers were assigned any available Arabic interpreter, regardless of regional variety. A Moroccan client struggled to get a Moroccan Arabic interpreter. The Home Office acknowledged too few interpreters for Kurdish across all dialects, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Georgian, and Bengali/Sylheti. These are real populations in the asylum system.
Quality assurance collapsed in 2023. The mandatory target of quality-assuring 3.5% of interviews was missed every month. Between January and October 2023, only one interview withdrawal was quality-assured. There is no working mechanism for catching interpretation errors.
What the inspectors missed
The ICIBI report makes six recommendations. None addresses interpreter accreditation. None calls for a verbatim record of what asylum seekers actually said. The report documents operational failure. It leaves the structure alone.
The structure is the procurement chain. The Home Office contracts agencies. Agencies recruit from available pools. Cost drives the choice. There is no mandatory qualification for asylum interpreters. The interpreter at the end of the chain can be the cheapest available.
The report names the symptoms: burnout, dialect mismatch, quality failure, cancellations. It does not name the cause.
What needs to change
Two reforms address the failure directly.
First: mandatory accreditation. For widely spoken languages, require DPSI or equivalent under Home Office contracts. For languages without a DPSI-qualified pool, require an independent competency pathway. Nobody should enter an asylum interview without verified competence.
Second: transcribe and retain the applicant's original-language testimony beside the English record. Audio captures the room. The decision transcript records the interpreter's English. Staff could say 40% of cancellations were interpreter-caused, and the Home Office could neither confirm nor deny it. That is the point. If interpretation is challenged, there must be something to check.
ICIBI confirmed the operational failure. The data is there. The structural diagnosis is still missing.
The two reforms are set out in the Translational Justice policy briefing.
The full ICIBI report is available at: assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/65e06d45f1cab36b60fc47ad/An_inspection_of_asylum_casework_June_to_October_2023.pdf