Oh dear. According to an article in the Sunday Telegraph this weekend, it looks as though the Isle of Wight Council recently received a roasting from the Plain English Campaign.
Apparently a report produced by the IWC has been branded ‘baffling gobbledygook’ by the Campaign who go on to say that it ‘lets the Isle of Wight Council down’.
The document, which promotes the Adult Learning Plan, contains as many as 16 different acronyms and such confusing jargon, that it’d be highly surprising if anyone could grasp what the report was about.
If this weren’t bad enough, Labour Cllr Debrorah Gardiner had urged the IWC not to publish the report saying, “I think none of you have actually read this report if you are prepared for this to go out to the general public.
“I read this and simply could not understand it. Get it re-written in a language people can actually understand.”
Come again?
One of our favourites in the report was the description of the Train to Gain programme:
“The programme has been well received within the Isle of Wight Council with recent pilot with leisure staff leading to the future expectation of this would be to have this project open to all departments of the council and have people directly referred through self referral and the PDR cycle.”
Eh?
Chrissie Maher OBE who is the founder of the Plain English Campaign, told the Telegraph, “For a successful ‘Train to Gain’ project they should speak plain to keep sane.”
Hear hear!
Confusion halts reporting
We’ve been baffled ourselves in the past when reading documents from the IW Council.
Take for example the delegated decision report on whether to ‘reduce discounts on the Cowes Chain Ferry Vouchers’.
We’d planned to cover this item on VB but got so confused by the wording of the proposal, that we weren’t entirely sure what exactly the IWC were proposing to do.
Anyway, see what you think when you read the full article on the Telegraph Web site.
Image: a r b o
