The widespread translation of signs and official documents into foreign languages is to end under a government drive to encourage new immigrants to learn to speak English.

Local councils and other public organisations, including the health service, are to be urged to dramatically reduce translation services and instead focus on promoting English. The move is an admission that the current practice of translating official documents and signs into minority languages has backfired by ensuring that immigrants never bother to learn English.

Hazel Blears, the Communities Secretary, will announce today the move as part of a package of measures intended to encourage integration of new immigrants. Other measures include the issuing of information packs and Citizen Days, where immigrants will learn about local customs and life in Britain. The packs will also include advice on social norms such as queuing and tolerance towards other faiths and communities. The Government wants the information packs for new immigrants to be available in doctors’ surgeries, local council offices, housing departments and at schools. Ms Blears added: “As a Government and a country, we must be honest: there are issues we need to address as a result of new patterns of migration and ensure that we have the ideas and policies to tackle them over next ten years.”

Ms Blears said that a key challenge facing the Government and local councils was in areas of the country that had not experienced immigration on a large scale in the past. In a letter to Darra Singh, who carried out a review on integration and cohesions, Ms Blears said: “For some people, living in local areas experiencing change can mean fewer shared experiences, a sense that others are getting preferential treatment, a sense that they can no longer influence decisions.”

She warned in the letter that this was being used by extremists seeking to drive a wedge between communities.

The amount of money for promoting community cohesion is to soar from £2 million in 2007-08 to £50 million over the next three years.

The guidance on translating official documents is to be issued within the next few weeks and will suggest that current practice must be rebalanced, with few documents in foreign languages. She said that ministers were not telling immigrants they must learn English but that the best way to get a job and to deal with other people was to speak English.

Ms Blears highlighted the role that employers could play in helping immigrants to learn English by pointing to language classes run for employees by First Direct buses in Manchester and by Tesco in Peterborough.

Police officers have said that some of the tensions linked to immigration were simply a result of immigrants not knowing standards of behaviour in Britain.

Julie Spence, the Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire Constabulary, said last month that immigrants needed to adjust to the British way of life.

“There were a lot of people who . . . because they used to carry knives for protection, they think they can carry knives here,” she said.

“We have worked with the communities because they don’t necessarily come to commit crime but they need to be told what you can and can’t do. We can identify a significant rise in drink-drive, which was down to people thinking that what they did where they came from, they could do here,” she said.

Latest figures from the Office of National Statistics estimate that net migration — the difference between those leaving and those entering the country and staying for more than a year — will run at 190,000 a year for the next 25 years.

Lost in translation

— Translation services cost councils about £25 million a year and the NHS £55 million. The police and the courts system spend another £31.3 million

— The Immigration and Nationality Directorate spends £8.5 million

— The interpretation market for business and the public sector is thought to be worth around £400 million

— 5.3 per cent of people living in Britain (2.3 million people) speak another language at home

— Peterborough City Council translates details of its refuse collection service into 15 languages 798,110 pupils of a total 7.3 million in state schools in England do not speak English as their first language

— 41 languages were spoken by callers to the inquiry centre of Thames Valley Police in the first six months of this year

Sources: BBC, British Medical Journal, Commission on Integration and Cohesion

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