A practitioner described one person giving the same account in two hearings. Coherent in one. Inconsistent in another. The difference was the interpreter. The record treated the inconsistency as the applicant's.
That is what the system is built to produce. It selects interpreters through cost-driven procurement, does not require accreditation, then treats their English record as neutral.
This piece draws on four sources: two immigration practitioners, a professional interpreter, and a professional standards body. They point to the same thing. Asylum proceedings assume accuracy the system cannot reliably produce.
UK asylum interpreters usually come through a chain: Home Office, contractor, sub-contracted agency, interpreter. The applicant has no role in the choice. One practitioner put it plainly: the chain decides who is heard and who is marked inconsistent. When interpreters change across hearings, the record changes with them. Recordings show accuracy breaking down. The institution calls it inconsistency.
The interview makes it worse. A second practitioner described it as a process built to test testimony for failure. The record becomes material for future suspicion.
The interpreter is a filter. Regional dialect, religious terminology, and the language of persecution decide what survives. Fluency alone is not enough. A near word may be defensible in the moment. Later, stripped of context, it becomes an inconsistency.
The interpreter explained the mechanism: time pressure, complex testimony, no preparation material, and an expectation of speed. Under those conditions, interpreters omit and edit. They choose fluency because precision at that speed is not possible.
The interpreter said those failures would fail a professional examination. The system does not record the choices. They said:
"Their duty is to interpret what is heard and understood... interpreting is not knowing two languages, it is understanding two languages."
The damage is invisible because the process is invisible. The record shows what the interpreter produced. The system treats that as what was said.
A professional standards body confirmed the conditions. The DPSI is the main UK qualification for public service interpreters. In practice, it tests basic cognitive and linguistic capacity more than specialist asylum knowledge. Even that is rarely enforced.
The system runs without mandatory accreditation. An agency can supply an interpreter with any qualification level, or none. The applicant cannot verify it. The lawyer may not know. The institution treats both records the same.
The system measures consistency after testimony passes through an untracked variable. An applicant may be consistent in their first language at every stage. The interpreter may vary. The record does not show it.
Inconsistency becomes credibility. Credibility often decides the case. You cannot decide whether an account holds together if you do not know whether the recorded account is the given account.
The minimum is simple: treat the interpreter as a variable in the evidence. Enforce accreditation. Give applicants a way to raise concerns. Record interpreter identity and qualification beside the testimony.
Until then, what the system produces is the record of a procurement chain.