Seriously, What the Hell?

Many of you may have read about the recent debacle regarding court interpreting in the UK. For those that haven't you can read about  what happened here and more detailed breakdowns here and here, but basically  the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), in an attempt to cut costs, contracted all court interpreting to a single firm, Applied Language Solutions (ALS), whereas previously (before Feb 1) each court had found their own interpreters as required from the National Register of Public Service Interpreters (NRPSI). Now, it seems that ALS was paying interpreters considerably less than the earned in the old system (GBP16-22 per hour for a minimum of one hour vs GBP30 per hour for a minimum of three hours), so many interpreters refused to work for ALS, cases are being deferred and people are being remanded to custody due to missing or unqualified interpreters and leading to increased court costs. What they have now is a system that is expensive and a potential miscarriage of justice instead of just expensive.

My question is how could they have possibly thought that this would end well? I can almost understand from the MoJ side. They thought instead of wasting public servant time looking for interpreters, they could contract out to a company that would do all the leg work. A comment in one of the above posts also mentioned that they thought the costs were higher than was actually the case. So I can almost understand their side. But, and this is a big but, why didn't they get an accurate costing of the issue, shouldn't they have done that first? And while I'm sure ALS made an attractive bid, this deal was worth 6.5 times more than ALS per year, shouldn't that have raised some red flags on their ability to handle such a large contract? And most damning of all, a trial involving ALS and police in Manchester had already been cancelled and the contract ripped up for many of the same failings.

Looking at the ALS side, things make even less sense. To start with, the deal was worth several times more than the company! I don't care how good you think you are, even putting your name in was a pretty stupid move. I also don't see how they thought they could have made money. Obviously the MoJ wouldn't want to spend more money per hour on this service (this is a money saving exercise), so ALS would have to pay the interpreters less in order to make a profit. But in what world would this work? Those who make a living this way wouldn't be willing to work for less and even the most altruistic would reconsider after such a significant pay cut. Translation work could conceivably be farmed out to people in countries with lower costs of living, but that wouldn't work here. They may have been aiming for interpreters with less experience but interpreting is quite a difficult skill to master and anyone smart enough to do it wouldn't do it cheap for long. I imagine this applies even more so to court interpreting. And don't they realise that people talk to each other? I've already read a half a dozen or so articles about this, interpreters will probably have read more.

And just to rub salt into the wound, it appears that ALS's standards are lax enough that they added someone's pet rabbit.

I don't understand how anybody thought this would work, especially ALS. It seems like their entire business plan for this undertaking relied on nobody realising how much they were getting screwed or ever talking to each other.