Plain English Campaign

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Supporters often contact us to complain about horrific terms and conditions. A recent report from the Children’s Commissioner for England provides a perfect example of why companies often hide behind gibberish.

The Commissioner, appointed by the Government to ‘represent the interests of young people’, presented their findings as part of their ‘growing up digital’ campaign. The Commissioner lays out their aims with the following statement.

This time last year, the NHS was ‘restructured’, apparently to make sure the needs of specific parts of the UK got the services they needed. Each new area was told it had to provide Sustainability and Transformation Plans (STPs), which would set out what that individual area needed, and how it would go about delivering those needs.

As part of that, all those different areas of the NHS came together in January this year to form 44 STP ‘footprints’, which would show a bigger picture of what was needed and where, and what was being done to help the patients in each area. The results of these plans and footprints would then supposedly help put into place structured five-year plans.

For decades now, we at Plain English Campaign have added our voice to those justifiably complaining about jargon in a number of areas. Financial jargon may well be at the top of the list of complaints we’ve received, and things don’t seem to be improving.

And with Brexit officially on the horizon (March/April has been mentioned) we really do need to know what is going on with the country’s banks and, in turn, our own finances.