That's all Bull

The authors of a recent housing paper have been accused of "mangled" writing by a Green councillor.

Mark Hill has now nominated the report for a Golden Bull Award - handed out annually by Plain English Campaign.

The award is given to the worst examples of barely-comprehensible English in public documents during the year.

Mr Hill said he nominated the report, on the subject of council housing allocation policy, after trying to convince fellow board members it needed to be rewritten in a clearer and more concise way.

But Rachel Rushforth, scrutiny manager at City of York Council, said authors had to find a difficult balance between clarity and the need to include all necessary information.

In his nomination, Mr Hill highlighted what he believed to be one of the worst offending paragraphs. It reads:

"A concise strategy for selection of such comparator authorities - requiring an equivalency to York in respect of the low volume of housing stock available and high customer demand within authorities - was agreed to be beneficial in refining the scope for this exercise."

Mr Hill said that if the report had been approved by board members, it could have ended up being read by the public.

"It's the worst report I've seen. I felt something had to be done," he said. "The first reaction to the use of this sort of language is to laugh at it.

"But the issue is serious. Convoluted, jargon-filled reports like this are elitist and waste everyone's time. York is a bureaucratic council which should be paying for better services, not mangling the language."

Mrs Rushforth said: "Although officers try to ensure that all reports are written in a style that's easy to understand, a balance has to be reached between producing easily-understood documents and ensuring that councillors have all the necessary information, including technical details, to reach a decision that's reasonable. This is a legal requirement.

"The scrutiny report in question dealt with complicated issues - therefore it needed to contain detailed information."

Previous winners of a Golden Bull Award

Previous winners of a Golden Bull Award include:

A Bank of Scotland letter to a customer:

"We hereby give you notice that Bank of Scotland have retrocessed, reponed and restored Executors and Assignees, in and to their own right and place in the undernoted policy of Assurance by our Office, Videlicet..."

Luton Education Authority as reported in the Daily Telegraph:

"Excluded kids were being given go-karting lessons. The authority claimed the scheme was 'a multi-agency project catering for holistic diversionary provision to young people for positive action linked to the community safety strategy and the pupil referral unit.'"

A Department of Health definition of a container:

"'Container', in relation to an investigational medicinal product, means the bottle, jar, box, packet or other receptacle which contains or is to contain it, not being a capsule, cachet or other article in which the product is or is to be administered, and where any such receptacle is or is to be contained in another such receptacle, includes the former but does not include the latter receptacle."

Updated: 11:05 Wednesday, February 09, 2005