Good for the printing industry, anway

Freedom of information request from More4 News has produced a situation of enormous waste in local and national government. This concerns the printing of leaflets in many languages, to help immigrants, of which some are read by only a few, if any' immigrants. Of the 218 local authorities which supplied figures over half, - 126, said they had increased their spending on this.

Birmingham, a Conservative-controlled council last year spent £361,096 on these multiple translations, but this was not the largest council spender- Glasgow spent £433,470, and Haringey £386,665 (- they might have spent much of this on a decent child protection service - they have literature in 193 different languages, Southwark £360,999 and Sheffield £360,000.

The chief complaint is that much of the literature was unread, and when placed on websites instead received few "hits" in many cases. (Haringey admitted that of 77 translated documents placed on line 26 were never accessed and most of the rest were viewed only once or twice.)

Other public bodies spent large sums on providing translations - the Metropolitan Police £10.6 million, Department for Work and Pensions £4 million, West Midlands Police £2.3 million, the Welsh Assembly £2 million and CPS £1.5 million. These contributed about 40% of the national total of £50.2 million spent on translating documents. This was an increase of 9 percent on the previous year, despite a plea from Hazel Blears, Communities minister, to give more careful consideration before embarking on the process.

(All this is, of course, additional to translator's services brought in to help in interviews of various kinds.)

Most, but not all, newly arrived immigrants settle in communities where there are already people from the same homeland, so there should be others to explain and interpret in their common language. In the absence of this, by arrangement translators could be brought in.

Baroness Warsi, shadow minister for community cohesion, described the situation as a "colossal waste of taxpayers money that flies in the face of common sense." She suggests that the money would be better spent on teaching newcomers to speak English.

Multiculturalism has broken up society. The sooner we can all speak the same language, the greater will be our cohesion.