The DWP has spent over £500,000 on translation services this year so far, and has spent more than £2.12million translating documents for non-English speakers in the last three years. The figures came to light after a question from Reform UK MP Lee Anderson about how much the Government has spent on such services.
He asked specifically, in a written question in Parliament, how much the DWP had spent on translating documents into languages other than English and the other native UK languages, in each year since 2023.
The MP also asked what languages the department had translated the documents into. DWP minister Andrew Western provided a response.
He shared figures showing that so far this year, the DWP has spent £546,323.38 on translation services.
Last year, the group spent a total of £882,118 on the services while in 2023, the total spend was £707,777.12.
He also shared a list of all the languages that the DWP had provided translation services into. These included:
- Gujarati
- Farsi (Persian)
- Russian
- Pashtu
- Bosnian
- Greek
- Thai
- German
- Kurdish / Kurdish Sorani
- Catalan
- Italian
- Simplified Chinese
- Estonian
- Amharic
- Lithuanian
- Welsh
- BSL (British Sign Language)
- Danish
- Spanish (LatAm)
- Hebrew
- Albanian
- Macedonian
- Tanzanian Swahili
- Dutch
- Arabic
- Croatian
- Spanish
- Bengali
- Turkish
- Traditional Chinese
- Polish
- Bulgarian
- Vietnamese
- Japanese
- Malay (Malaysian)
- Norwegian
- Portuguese
- Portuguese (Brazilian)
- Tagalog (Filipino)
- Somali
- Indian Punjabi
- Pakistani Punjabi
- Hungarian
- Oromo ( Afan)
- Romanian
- Braille (Unified English)
- Swedish
- Serbian
- Slovak
- Latvian (Lettish)
- Ukrainian
- Bahasa Indonesia
- Dari
- Hindi
- French
- Tamil
- English (Easy Read)
- Korean
- Slovenian
- Kinyarwanda
- Icelandic
- Finnish
- Nepali
- Urdu
- Sindhi
- Czech
- Sinhalese
- Kazakh
- Galician
- Flemish
- Maltese
- Uzbek
- Tigrinya
- Castilian
- Georgian
- Danish
- Norwegian
- Kurdish Kurmanji.
Former Reform UK MP Rupert Lowe previously asked in Parliament if the DWP would consider making it its policy not to provide translation and interpretation services for speakers of non-UK languages for its services.
Mr Western also provided the Government response on this occasion, issing a reply in May this year. He said: “DWP has a statutory duty to provide language services to its customers in line with the Equality Act.
“The aim of the service is to provide spoken and written translation services for staff and customers who are deaf, hard of hearing or do not speak English as a first language in order to access DWP services.”
He said that the language service needs and spending are assessed to make sure they are “good value for money for taxpayers”.
He also confirmed the DWP has “no plans” to move away from offering these language services.