The asylum interview is supposed to establish what happened. Practitioners describe it as a process designed to find inconsistency. Between those two purposes stands the interpreter who is selected through a procurement chain the applicant has no role in, subject to no mandatory accreditation requirement, and producing an official record the institution treats as neutral.
Over the past few months, I have been conducting an independent investigation into interpreter procurement failures in UK asylum proceedings, drawing on interviews with immigration solicitors, barristers, a professional interpreter, and a professional standards body. All sources are anonymised. The findings are consistent: the same testimony, given by the same person, can appear coherent or inconsistent in the official record depending on which interpreter was present. The system treats that outcome as the applicant's problem.
The procurement chain runs from the Home Office to a primary contractor, to a sub-contracted agency, to the individual interpreter. Cost drives each stage. The applicant plays no role in the selection. There is no mechanism for them or their legal representative to raise concerns about interpreter quality before, during, or after the hearing.
One solicitor described this chain as deciding who will be heard and who will be considered inconsistent. When the interpreter changes across hearings, as they frequently do, the record changes with them because a different person approximated it differently.
This is where law and language meet. Practitioners say fluency alone is not enough. Asylum testimony requires more than fluency: familiarity with regional dialect, the specific terminology of persecution, and the cultural weight carried by particular phrases. An interpreter who finds no direct equivalent and reaches for the nearest available word makes a defensible choice in the moment. Extracted from context and tested against a later account, that approximation becomes an inconsistency in the official record.
A professional interpreter described the mechanism. Interpreting under that kind of pressure, with no preparation, complex testimony, and a hearing built for speed, forces choices. Prioritising fluency over precision because precision, at that pace, is not available. The institution creates those conditions and does not acknowledge the result.
"The duty is to interpret what is heard and understood."
The record shows what was heard through the procurement chain, not what the applicant said. The institution then treats that record as if it were what the applicant actually said.
The Diploma in Public Service Interpreting (DPSI) is the primary professional qualification for public service interpreters in the UK. A professional standards body confirmed it works in practice as a basic aptitude test, and that even this is rarely enforced. Asylum proceedings routinely rely on agency interpreters who have not completed it.
There is no mandatory accreditation requirement. An agency can supply an unqualified interpreter. The applicant cannot verify this. The record produced by an unqualified interpreter and the record produced by a qualified one are treated identically by the institution.
Inconsistency is a credibility finding. In cases where corroborating evidence is scarce by definition, credibility is often determinative. If the inconsistency originates with the interpreter, the system has no mechanism to identify this. The official record simply shows a person whose account does not hold together.
The minimum requirement should be to treat the interpreter as a measurable variable, not as a transparent medium. Enforce accreditation requirements. Give applicants a mechanism to raise concerns. Record interpreter identity and qualification alongside the testimony.
The access to justice problem in asylum proceedings is about whether the hearing records what the applicant actually said.