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Start of a jargon-free chapter
OF the 250 publications Calderdale Council produces, just 16 per cent are understandable and useful.
Who says so? Well, the council themselves.
In plain and straightforward English. The kind everyone can digest and understand.
Now in an effort to help people fully understand councilese, gobbledegook is to be banned from all documents.
But what is it with governance and officialdom that, on so many occasions, leads it down a road to literary suicide?
This prime example illustrates the problem: "Since 2002 there has been greater emphasis on the information a council holds on the website and the new model scheme from the Information Commissioner seems to be content that if information is signposted in the publication scheme as being on the website, so as to be available to the public, then that can be the primary way that information is made available."
It is not just happening in Calderdale either.
The same meandering, complex sentences appear in town hall documents the length and breadth of Britain.
And Westminster is not immune either.
The cynics out there might suggest that by speaking in tongues our councillors and civil servants deliberately set out to baffle and confuse. And that somewhere behind the mass of poorly constructed sentences there is deep meaning only the few understand.
But that can hardly be the case in pamphlets, fliers and posters whose primary purpose is to inform and advise the public of the various services on offer.
The problem is that over a number of years what started out as buzzwords or phrases have been adopted as key components of council speak.
Once these are added to the morass of jargon and endless acronyms, is it any surprise we are left with something that in terms of understanding might as well be Sanskrit? And that is doing a disservice to the ancient Indians.
The council spends 600,000 a year on various publications, which is not an insubstantial amount.
For that, at the very least, its electorate should expect something intelligible.
At last it seems a new chapter is to begin.
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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