EVER broken down a corporate silo? Or adopted a cross-cutting strategic approach?
If you’ve no idea of what either of these phrases means, then you’re not alone. I haven’t the foggiest either.
These phrases are yet more examples of council-speak, that bugbear of the Plain English Campaign. It’s no wonder agendas and reports sent out by public authorities often run to hundreds of pages, because large swathes of them are utter gobbledygook.
During my time in journalism I’ve come into contact with several different councils. And while none of them have a spotless record when it comes to this issue, I can easily say Luton Borough Council has been by far the worst offender.
Every meeting agenda that lands on my desk seems to contain a new phrase guaranteed to elicit a groan from the newsdesk.
A quick glance through the one before me now reveals that a particular council service is not moving, but ‘migrating’. I bet that’s a sight to behold, akin to the dramatic journey of Pacific salmon as they travel thousands of miles to spawn, or when all those red crabs scuttle en masse across Christmas Island. We’d better alert David Attenborough.
A proposal to get rid of the old people’s care homes that the council runs at the cost of £500,000 a year is described as ‘service improvement via reprovision’. A relative of a lady who lives at one of the homes called us to complain about the wording, saying he’d never heard the word ‘reprovision’ in his life. I know this particular chap to be intelligent and well-informed, as he regularly submits letters to our newspaper. If the word was a new one to him, then God knows what chance a lot of people out there have of knowing what it means.
But we can’t really be surprised by all this when, in council-speak, people are no longer even called people. Why would anyone use the word ‘people’ when there’s a whole variety of other fun names, such as ‘service user’, ‘client’ or ‘stakeholder’?
Still, it must take the sting out of making the decision to move someone from familiar surroundings if you can call her a ‘stakeholder’, rather than, say, a frail 90-year-old widow with dementia. Stakeholder makes her actually sound quite scary, or as though she’s equipped with a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-like wit, strength and agility. So the traumatic upheaval of being moved out of a home where she’s safe and comfortable probably won’t cause too many problems, then.
The worst thing is that this nonsense isn’t just confined to the Town Hall, it’s seeping out and polluting the language of the outside world. I’ve lost count of the number of times someone at a school or nursery has told me that they’ve ‘signposted’ certain services to people. No, you’ve TOLD these people about the services.
‘Going forward’ is another one. I recently sat through a presentation by a very high ranking officer from Bedfordshire Police, where he must have started every other sentence with these two words. As far as I know, going forward is the general direction of travel for the whole of humanity (well, maybe not the whole of it, but that’s another discussion), as time travel is yet to be invented.
My personal favourite has to be the substitution of ‘cleansing’ for ‘cleaning’. Sounds so much nicer, doesn’t it – like taking your make-up off, rather than picking up used condoms or half-eaten kebabs off the street.
I shouldn’t complain too much though, as in these tough economic times all this nonsense is probably providing a job for someone. I’m guessing they’re on a computer, somewhere in the bowels of the Town Hall, entering sensible words into an online thesaurus and stringing the results together to form meaningless drivel to insert into council documents. I do hope this is the case, as surely no human could come up with this rubbish on their own.
Rant over, I’m off to develop a core strategy for the reprovisioning of fluid in my tea mug, as the level of resource input into the caffeine stream from other tea round stakeholders is currently diminished. Perhaps they’ve rationalised their hot beverage output bundle?