Health Services: Translation Services
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the (a) cost for translation of and (b) percentage of communications in each language in e-RS communication letters was so far this year.
Answered by Dr Zubir Ahmed
NHS England only incurs costs for changes to templates or when new languages are added. Therefore, the primary cost is associated with template updates, not per-letter translation. No changes have been made to templates in 2025, nor have additional languages been added, so no costs for translation have been incurred.
There are no additional variable costs for providing a translated letter, as an English language version of the letter would be sent instead. The following table shows the total number of e-RS letters as well as the proportion of these letters that were translated, sorted by the language they were translated to, for 2024/25 and for 2025/26 to date:
| 2024/25 | 2025/26 |
Total e-RS letters | 1,066,650 | 402,685 |
Arabic | 0.64% | 0.57% |
Bengali | 0.82% | 0.74% |
Gujarati | 0.29% | 0.30% |
Kurdish | 0.21% | 0.18% |
Persian | 0.22% | 0.20% |
Polish | 0.75% | 0.73% |
Punjabi | 0.50% | 0.45% |
Somali | 0.26% | 0.22% |
Turkish | 0.36% | 0.35% |
Urdu | 1.35% | 1.27% |
Albanian | 0.15% | 0.13% |
Chinese | 0.06% | 0.06% |
French | 0.17% | 0.15% |
Greek | 0.08% | 0.08% |
Hindi | 0.17% | 0.15% |
Hungarian | 0.09% | 0.09% |
Italian | 0.18% | 0.16% |
Lithuanian | 0.12% | 0.10% |
Portuguese | 0.32% | 0.30% |
Romanian | 0.48% | 0.44% |
Russian | 0.16% | 0.17% |
Slovak | 0.15% | 0.13% |
Spanish | 0.30% | 0.26% |
Tamil | 0.24% | 0.18% |
Wolof | 0.00% | 0.01% |
Total translated | 8.05% | 7.44% |
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