FOI 2025/1247

Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 I would like to request the following information from your organisation:

1. How much was spent on translation and interpretation costs over the last five financial years (2020/2021, 2021/2022, 2022/23, 2023/24, 2024/25)? Please could this data be broken down into a total sum over the five years and also broken down by each financial year.

2. Please can a separate list of the top five languages incurring the highest cost in the financial year 2024/25 also be included, with how much was spent on each language.

1. NHS Greater Manchester (Integrated Care Board) was formed on 1^st July 2022, and therefore not all data pre-1^st July 2022 may be available (or may not be fully accurate) as they were managed under what were previously ten Clinical Commissioning Group’s for each locality within Greater Manchester.

Note: Commissioning responsibility for GP Practices and registered patients transferred to from Greater Manchester into NHS Debry and Derbyshire ICB in 2022.

The above figures mainly relate to funding / expenditure for interpretation and translation support to service users accessing primary care services. Funding for accessing interpretation and translation within a VCSE, Community and Secondary Care setting is managed through block funding arrangements, grants, or incorporated within agreed tariff prices for commissioned service delivery.

2. The data varies between locality to locality, and therefore what maybe the highest spoken language which requires interpretation and translation support in one locality may not be the same for another.

Overall, as a general response, the top five spoken languages within Greater Manchester, and are therefore amongst the highest requested for interpretation and translation, are:

• Urdu
• Panjabi
• Bengali
• Polish
• Arabic

Currently, we do not hold a full breakdown of data across the ten localities to be able to provide exact costings spent against every language, but this is an area we are working on for the future of the service, to better understand usage.