One nation under jargon

In the new spirit of open government you are invited to witness a typical evening at home with young Humphry Appleby, who is head of engagement and consultation at Hackborough council and a rising star in public service. He and his partner Bernardette, who is lead in communications and democracy at the neighbouring borough of Little Gibbering, are interfacing over dinner.

“Do you have an action strategy coterminous with the evening, darling?” says Bernardette. Humphry flicks idly through the Radio Times. “My priority is to embed bottom-down on the sofa and actively engage with the Albert Square community,” he replies.

“Going forward, could I facilitate delivery of a second tranche of rhubarb crumble?” she wonders.

Humphry pats his stomach. “Not for me, dearest heart,” he says. “I’m trying to rationalise my framework parameters.”

You might think this all sounds a bit unlikely and nobody carries on like this at home. In that case, why do people think it is all right to use such language at work?

Here is a simple psychological test to detect whether you are suitable for modern public service. All you have to do is read the following sentence without flying into a rage: “You will be concentrating on common delivery mechanisms and spend management solutions, category and supplier relationship management and stakeholder engagement approaches.”

If you are now red in the face I am afraid you have failed.

That magnificent example of what George Orwell would have referred to as Newspeak came from a recent job advertisement. It described the responsibilities of something called the head of common delivery enablers at the office of government commerce, a department of the Treasury. The successful applicant will be paid up to £64,240 a year for whatever it is he or she will do.

The wonderful thing about that job description is the way you can arrange the words in pretty much any order and they will still make just as much sense to the untrained eye: “You will be concentrating on stakeholder management solutions, common approach delivery and supplier category mechanisms.”

You would apply for that, wouldn’t you? Except that it has been deliberately designed to baffle you. If Gordon Brown is serious about restoring public trust in government, this is where he might start.

The prime minister last week announced a series of measures to make government more transparent. His main plans are to reform the House of Lords – again – and make it more difficult for MPs to fiddle their expenses. Towards the end of his statement, Brown said he wanted the public to be more involved in decisions.

“Democratic reform cannot be led in Westminster alone,” he said. “It cannot be top down.

The public want to be, and should be, part of the solution.”

For that to happen, the public must be able to understand what is going on. Public bodies will have to conduct their affairs in English because there seems to be a growing rage against the first language of government – gobbledegook, flimflam and blather. AS Brown addressed the Commons on Wednesday, teachers were digesting a report that condemned the “Orwellian language of performance management” in their profession. The Nuffield Review, a comprehensive look at secondary education, claimed that the deadening language of government was making teachers lose the will to teach.

According to the report, the talk in modern education circles is not about lessons and learning but of performance indicators, targets and customers (they are the pupils, by the way).

“As the language of performance and management has advanced, so we have proportionately lost a language of education which recognises the intrinsic value of pursuing certain sorts of question . . . of seeking understanding, of exploring through literature and the arts what it means to be human,” said the report.

In such a world the normal exchange between a pupil and a teacher is “dialogic teaching”. Offering subject options to children is “articulated progression”. The achievement expected of a pupil is a “level descriptor”.

The report contained the third pained protest this year against a culture that seems to have gripped public service. Last month the British Medical Association complained about jargon in the National Health Service, where patients can be described as “clients” and “service users”.

In March the Local Government Association (LGA) said the problem was so bad it had issued a list of 200 words and phrases that should be banned by the 423 councils it represents. “The public sector must not hide behind impenetrable jargon and phrases,” said Margaret Eaton, a Bradford councillor who is chairman of the LGA.

“Why do we have to have ‘coterminous stakeholder engagement’ when we could just talk to people instead?”

The Plain English Campaign has been trying to fight the same battle for the past 30 years, yet still the tide of jargon keeps rising. It might even have reached a stage where it is becoming a deterrent, stopping ordinary people getting involved in local decisions.

“Councillors I have spoken to have admitted that it takes about two years to get used to the language as part of their duties,” said Marie Clair, a Plain English campaigner.

Tony Greaves, a Liberal Democrat peer and a councillor in Pendle, Lancashire, compares jargon with weeds in a garden. You can pull up one weed, but you know that two more will appear elsewhere.

Two years ago Greaves decided to apply some political Weedol and persuaded his council to adopt a plain English strategy (it had to be a strategy, of course). “They’ve made some progress since then but it creeps back,” he said. “You just have to keep at it. For example, everybody in the council knows that if they use the word ‘stakeholder’ then I will stand up and object.” He does the same in the House of Lords, where ministers are also fond of engaging with stakeholders.

“It’s habit and it’s lazy,” said Greaves. “A lot of this management speak is sloppy – it’s not very precise. You can talk about stakeholders without defining who you are taking about. When you try to probe it and find out who they’re talking about, they say, ‘Well, everybody’s a stakeholder’.”

There’s nothing new about jargon. The word itself used to mean language specific to a profession and dates back to the 14th century; the word gobbledegook was coined in the United States in the 1940s to describe political waffle.

Greaves blames new Labour for the most recent explosion. “They were looking for new ways of describing things and new words to use in politics,” he said. “They were deliberately wanting to avoid the old socialist words. So they adopted transatlantic management speak.”

Fashionable words first take a grip in Whitehall, but soon spread like a virus to quangos and local government (which rely on central government for funds). Any private company that wants to win a public sector contract must then learn to speak the same language and soon we are all at it – thinking blue-sky thoughts and looking for predictors of beaconicity.

Words that were once jargon have even moved into main-stream conversation: brain-storming, benchmark, water-cooler moments, firefighting a problem – all these are slowly establishing themselves.

Let’s not get too snooty here.

Every profession has its private language. Journalism, for example, has the “reverse ferret”, a term coined to describe the way a newspaper will perform a complete and unacknowledged about-turn on a subject.

Yet sometimes people take jargon to ridiculous lengths. Graham Hopkins, author of Plain English for Social Services, once saw a report that described “localised lighting to beds” – a concept known to most of us as bedside lights.

He has seen taps described as “hot water outlets”, the serving of food described as “nutritional management”, and he once puzzled over something called a “domestic experience environment”. That turned out to be a Wendy house.

Hopkins, who is now a communications consultant to social service departments, says public servants use jargon to win promotion.

“I rose from a lowly admin position to become an assistant director and realised as I went through the rungs of management how my language started to change,” he said. “I stopped having plans and started having strategies.”

Once you are immersed in the world of jargon, you begin to lose touch with reality. Who, outside the world of social services, would think it wise to advertise for a “child abuse co-ordinator”? Yet this term is in common use.

“Social care is full of poor writing,” said Hopkins. “It is often bloated, pompous and jargon-filled. Sometimes even people who work in social care struggle with its meaning. And if they struggle, what chance to do the rest of us have?”

Most stakeholders in the jargon-speaking community seem to agree that this specialised language is rarely used ina deliberate way to bamboozle the public; it is just a way of making professionals feel better about what they do.

People use long, pompous sentences because they fear plain speaking will make them appear unprofessional, even maverick.

The massaging of public sector egos is apparent in euphemistic and impressive-sounding job titles. Epsom & Ewell council in Surrey is advertising for a refuse and recycling loader – a dustman to you and me; while Hull council is seeking a partnership support area based reporting officer – also known as a researcher. HOW can we change? “To write effectively we need to know three things,” said Hopkins. “Why are we writing it? What do we want to happen as a result of our writing? Who are we writing for?

“If the target audience includes the public, then this means using shorter sentences (average about 15-20 words) and shorter words.”

Jargon enrages the public; it stands in the way of clear thinking and expression and it wastes time. It even costs money as councils now employ plain English consultants to teach their staff how to write.

Perhaps the biggest danger is the way that people lose sight of what words mean. Here is a magnificent example, uncovered by the TaxPayers’ Alliance which campaigns to reduce waste in the public sector, of a local council’s boast about what it offers residents: “Access to your services and information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The offices are open Monday to Thursday from 8.45am to 5.15pm and Fridays 8.45am to 4.45pm.”

And you probably have to take those hours with a tranche of salt.

A holistic toolkit for beacon stakeholders

Stakeholder

What it used to mean: A person who holds money being gambled while other people are awaiting the outcome of that gamble

What it means now: Anybody who has got a vested interest in anything, especially companies, pensions, quangos and bureaucracies primarily bent on self-preservation

Most used by: Middle managers in local government

Engagement

What it used to mean: 1) an appointment; 2) a promise to marry

What it means now: When politicians say they are desperate for “democratic engagement” it doesn’t mean they want to marry their constituents (though some will do anything for votes). It really means they want to “talk to” or even “listen to” the electorate (the latter is less common)

Most used by: MPs about to lose their jobs

Beaconicity

What it used to mean: Once upon a time a beacon was a signal fire or guiding light

What it means now: Beacon model, beacon status, beaconicity, and predictors of beaconicity – complicated ways of saying “outstanding”

Most used by:Teachers angling for more money

Toolkit

What it used to mean: A box in which you kept spanners

What it means now:Any form of guidance, printed or online, to help you through a subject. You might, for example, need a toolkit to understand local authority jargon

Most used by:Marketing executives who think the word “guide” just isn’t interesting

Holistic governance

What it used to mean: Holistic was simply “of or involving the whole”, and governance was the “act or manner of governing”

What it means now:Who knows. Politics by acupuncture? Wholemeal local councils? Presumably if you experience mere governance, without the holistic bit, your rulers are half-asleep on the job

Most used by:People prone to coterminous joined-up articulation habits

Dialogue

What it used to mean: A passage of conversation between two or more people

What it means now: When bureaucrats and other officials profess they want to “engage in dialogue” it means they spend a lot of taxpayers’ money asking for voters’ opinions before proceeding to ignore them

Most used by: All politicians