DwP advantages hotline spends £8m a 12 months of taxpayers money on translators for 90 totally different languages – some spoken by fewer than a million folks

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is spending £8million a year on translators, paying out an average of £250 per call for non-English speaking benefits claimants.

Over the past three years the DWP has offered translation services for almost 90 different languages, many of which are spoken solely in remote pockets of the globe by under a million people. 

These include 44 calls over the past three years to provide translation services for Mirpuri speakers, a specific dialect of the Pahari-Pothwari language used in parts of India and Pakistan. It has an estimated speaking population of just 500,000 people globally.

Other rare translations included two calls for the Bassa language which is used by roughly 800,000 people in areas of Liberia, Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone. 

Official DWP figures show that there have been over 90,000 phone or video calls and in-person meetings where translation services have been required in the last three years.

This came at a total cost of £23.1million and covered 88 languages.

These figures also included sign language interpretation which was needed in 2,600 calls by both claimants and the DWP’s own staff.

Many European languages such as German, French and Italian had low numbers of calls requiring translation services despite having sizeable immigrant communities in the UK. 

Official figures from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) show that over £23million has been spent by the department on translation services over the last three years

Former Health Minister Neil O’Brien obtained the figures through parliamentary questions and has said that it raises the question as to why the UK is offering benefits to people who cannot speak English. 

‘From schools and hospitals to welfare, the Government now spends significant sums of money on translation and interpretation,’ Mr O’Brien said. 

‘The sheer range of different languages shows the challenges of managing a hyper-multicultural society.

‘Some people who have paid in all their lives and got little back might ask, why are we giving benefits to people who can’t even speak English? This data also shows that some groups do much better than others at integrating. 

‘In general, migrants from developed and culturally similar countries are far less likely to need translation, or even rely on benefits in the first place’.

The most translated language over the previous three years was Arabic, according to the DWP. It accounted for almost 14 per cent of all calls (12,819).

Romanian came second with 11,706 calls, before a sizeable drop off to Farsi (5,714), Polish (5,725) and Kurdish Sorani (5,612). 

Other prominently featured languages included Urdu (4,424), Ukrainian (4,422), Bengali (3,657), Bulgarian (3,228) and Slovak (3,077).

The government currently employs interpretation contractors at job centres across the UK

Tigrinya, an language spoken in northern regions of Eritrea and Ethiopia, placed quite highly with 3,027 recorded calls.

Similarly rare languages which the DWP provided translation services for included Twi in Ghana, Senufo from northern areas of Ivory Coast, Kassonke in Mali and Bambara from parts of West Africa.

The government currently employs interpretation contractors at job centres across the UK, with additional translation support offered via video and phone calls for these rarer dialects.

Reform MP Rupert Lowe has since called for the DWP to scrap all foreign language interpretation services. 

‘Evidently, we are allowing too many low-skilled migrants into our country who are incapable of supporting themselves’, the Great Yarmouth MP said.

Speaking to the release of the figures, a DWP spokesperson said: ‘We support millions of people through Universal Credit payments every year, with only two per cent of hundreds of millions of calls to the department requiring an interpreter in 2024 and clear rules on who qualifies for support’.