Council urged to ditch the gobbledygook and embrace plain English
March 21, 2009 8:41 AM
Plain English, please!
Westminster council has been found to be using most of the 200 jargon words and phrases that councils were this week urged to ban from use.
The list of 200 pieces of jargon was created this week by the Local Government Association (LGA), a group representing local councils. The LGA wants councils to use simple, plain English instead.
Unfortunately for Westminster, a simple search of the council's website by the local Liberal Democrats found that 170 of the 200 jargon words and phrases appeared on the website. Put together, they occurred a staggering 23,990 times on westminster.gov.uk!
The jargon words and phrases include 'beacon', 'citizen empowerment' and 'coterminous', as well as 'gateway review', 'rebaselining' and 'thinking outside the box'. All of these examples are found on the Westminster's website.
Commenting, Mark Blackburn, the LibDem parliamentary candidate for the new Westminster North constituency, said: "Westminster seems addicted to gobbledygook. It's amazing that examples of jargon were found almost 24,000 times on the council website."
Examples of what can be found on the council's website include:
"The City Management DPD flows from, and in many cases, adds more detail to the policies in the Core Strategy and it will set out the inter-relationship between spatial, temporal and sensory place shaping that the Core Strategy Preferred Options document highlighted" - in a planning document
"The LA will work with secondary schools to implement a 'hard to place' pupils protocol which will result in the responsibility being passed from the LA to schools with peer challenge where illegal off-rolling takes place" - in a document about schools
"Baseline data available through the CSi highlights the potential for further efficiencies through integrating these online services with backoffice systems and incentivising customer channel switch" - in a document about putting government services on the internet
Mark added, "The council needs to write documents in plain English that will make sense to anyone. It's simple. I mean, look at these examples of what council officials are writing. These are in council documents, and council documents are public documents that members of the general public should be able to get hold of, read and understand.
"A Liberal Democrat-controlled Westminster would discourage officials from using jargon and insist on plain English."
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