Whitehall Taskforce Spends 18 Months Simplifying Government Language, Produces Document No One Can Read

The Cabinet Office has this week launched the Government Plain Language and Communication Accessibility Initiative — or GPLCAI, pronounced, according to page 34 of the accompanying glossary, 'however feels most intuitive to the individual stakeholder' — marking what ministers are calling a 'historic moment' in the long and largely unsuccessful effort to make the British state comprehensible to the people it governs.

The initiative, which has been in development since the spring of last year and involved representatives from fourteen departments, three arm's-length bodies, and a consultant named Gerald, culminates in a flagship guidance document entitled Towards Clarity: A Framework for the Facilitation of Plain and Accessible Communication Outputs Across Central Government Functions (Version 1, Non-Superseding).

It runs to 312 pages. The glossary alone is 47.

'We Wanted Something Anyone Could Understand'

At a launch event held in a conference room the Cabinet Office described as 'strategically central but logistically peripheral' — it was in Whitehall, but the lifts were broken — the initiative's lead official, newly appointed Clarity Czar Dominic Hale, explained the thinking behind the project.

'What we identified, through an extensive process of communicative diagnostic assessment, was a fundamental misalignment between the linguistic register deployed by government-facing communications professionals and the reception capacity of the lay public end-user,' Mr Hale told journalists, several of whom had stopped writing things down.

Asked whether he could say that more simply, Mr Hale consulted his notes.

'We talk funny and people don't understand us,' he said. 'That's in the executive summary. Page six. Though you'll want to cross-reference the terminology annex before drawing conclusions.'

The document itself opens with a foreword from the Minister for the Cabinet Office, which uses the phrase 'going forward' eleven times, describes the initiative as 'a step-change in our communicative offer', and contains one sentence that a sub-editor at this publication, after three readings, concluded was grammatically optional.

The Glossary: A Selected Tour

The 47-page glossary — formally titled A Lexical Reference Compendium for the Operationalisation of Plain Language Principles — defines 214 terms intended to help civil servants communicate without jargon. A brief selection:

Plain language is defined as 'language which prioritises comprehension-enabling clarity in its structural and lexical composition, absent of unnecessarily technical or domain-specific terminology, except where such terminology is itself defined within this or a related framework document.'

Simple sentence is defined across two paragraphs and includes a footnote directing the reader to Annex C.

The public is defined as 'non-specialist end-recipients of government communication outputs, excluding those with professional or institutional engagement with the relevant policy domain, as further specified in the Stakeholder Segmentation Sub-Framework (2023, currently under review).'

Annex C, for those who looked, defines a simple sentence as 'a sentence that is simple.'

Think Tanks React With Enthusiasm No One Fully Understands

The Centre for Governance Communication and Public Language Effectiveness — a think tank based in a serviced office in Westminster that was founded in 2021 and has published four reports, all of which recommend further reports — welcomed the initiative in a statement released Tuesday morning.

'This represents a paradigm-shifting contribution to the field of linguistic accessibility frameworks,' said the Centre's Director of Strategic Articulation, Dr Priya Moss. 'By operationalising clarity as a deliverable rather than merely an aspiration, GPLCAI positions the UK government at the frontier of plain language innovation.'

Dr Moss was asked whether she had read the document. She said she had read 'the relevant sections'. She was asked which sections those were. She said she would follow up.

A second think tank, the Institute for Democratic Legibility, issued a more cautious response, noting that the framework 'raises as many questions as it answers, though we acknowledge that may itself be a feature rather than a defect, pending further stakeholder consultation.' The Institute has been calling for a plain English initiative since 2017 and described this one as 'broadly directionally correct'.

The Small Print, Which Is Quite a Lot of Print

Perhaps the most striking feature of the Plain Language Initiative is what appears on page 309, in a section titled 'Implementation Notes and Legacy Document Relationships'.

The guidance, it transpires, does not supersede three existing Cabinet Office communications frameworks: the 2019 Government Digital Communication Style Standards, the 2021 Accessible Language in Public Sector Contexts: A Practitioner's Handbook, and something called the Interdepartmental Tone of Voice Alignment Protocol, which no one at the launch event could confirm was still in use but which Legal had advised should remain live 'as a precaution'.

Civil servants wishing to apply the new plain language guidance are therefore directed to read it 'in conjunction with' all three legacy documents, 'noting areas of overlap, divergence, or constructive tension, and applying professional judgement in cases of apparent conflict'.

Mr Hale, when this was put to him, said the situation was 'not ideal but also not unusual', and that a reconciliation document was 'in the pipeline'.

The reconciliation document, he confirmed, would itself be subject to the plain language guidelines. It is expected to run to approximately 200 pages.

What Happens Next

Departments have been given eighteen months to 'embed' the framework, a process that will involve mandatory training for all Senior Executive Officers and above, a self-assessment toolkit, and a series of regional workshops described in the guidance as 'communicative capacity-building interventions'.

Members of the public wishing to submit feedback on the Plain Language Initiative may do so via an online portal, which is currently available in seventeen languages, none of which is plain English, and which requires users to create an account using a Government Gateway login.

The full document is available on GOV.UK. It has an estimated reading time, noted in the footer, of four hours and twelve minutes, 'excluding annexes'.

A spokesperson for the Cabinet Office said the initiative 'marks a genuine turning point in how government communicates with citizens', and that further details would be set out 'in due course'.

They did not define 'due course'. It is not in the glossary.