The £444,000,000 rip off

If you click on this link, you will find a copy of a typical England and Wales Court Summons. In this case it is a Witness Summons for the Court of Protection relating to people detained under the Mental Health Act. The form is a simple template where one needs to fill in the boxes.

Its fair to say that there are many hundreds of different versions of summons forms, for different levels of court and different statuses of those who are summonsed to attend. But they are all basically similar, they are all simple templates. Three quarters of the details on all of the different templates ask for similar basic information NAME ............. Address............ Date, Place and Time of hearing etc.

Using the Court of Protection form and just fiddling with the very basic programmes that I have on my computer I was able to create a template, a Welsh translation of the template and the ability to automatically fill both forms at once in less than half an hour.

I am not a computer expert, I have no training, I have taught myself to do what I want to do on a computer by trial and error. But if I am able to create a form filling application in two languages in less than half an hour (albeit for just one form) why on earth is the Libra system being delivered in an incomplete state 7 years late and at a cost of £444 Million?

The system is incomplete because it can't offer Welsh & English bilingual summonses. Rectifying this problem is going to cost another £4 million.

Facebook was translated into Welsh by a group of about a dozen volunteers over a period of six months or so. Facebook, one would imagine, is a more complex system than a simple form filling exercise. If those volunteers offered to translate Libra their work would be valued at about £300,000 each! If those volunteers were to produce a virtual invoice for the cost of translating Facebook I doubt if they would come close to even 2% of what Libra claims the translation costs will be.

The whole Libra project raises rip-off questions. But the £4 million translation cost raises even more worries. £4 million for a single Welsh Translation service is manna from heaven to the anti-Welsh language lobby, it is a gift to those who want excuses for not supporting the language. As an avid supporter of the language I can think of much better language support uses for such a huge amount of money than issuing summonses - how many language tutors and learners could be supported by such a sum?

I'm not sure how or by whom Welsh Language projects should be investigated - but this is a project in need of a very serious investigation!