06 September 2010
Our local authorities boast about their openness and accessibility to the electorate; about their desire for consultation and cooperation with the community and local groups; about engaging people in the lifestyle changing actions that genuine sustainable development entails; about their desire to communicate effectively about what they’re doing and what they propose doing. And so often they fail to do all this as well as they could because of the language they use for the titles of their staff, departments and policies. I feel a rant coming on!
Let’s start with what I seem to remember (or maybe I made up the phrase myself) being called “titular aggrandisement”, which refers to the way local authority job titles get longer and longer (and often less descriptive of the job), often by the addition of buzzwords like “community” and “development”. So we have Arts Development Officers and Path Development Officers and a whole plethora of Development Officers through every service of local authorities. There is nothing that my local Arts Development Officer does that her Arts Officer predecessors did not do. It does not communicate her function any better to the public. Almost every “development” job description is unnecessary. And that applies to the “community” job descriptions as well. They are of plague proportions - Community Recycling Officer, Community Traffic Warden (yes - unbelievable but true) etc. Don't we know that these people service the community? Are there local authority officers not serving the community? Why is my Arts Development Officer (she works for Stirling Council and she does an excellent job!) not my Community Arts Development Officer – is she not working for the community?
My stimulus to write this piece came from an short article in my local free sheet the Stirling News about the Comfort Partnership Scheme (know what that’s about? – more later!) and how more information could be obtained from the council’s Strategic Corporate Asset Management Service. Say that again! Well actually, don’t! Do strategic and corporate mean anything at all in this context (and in most council titles)? So erase them and we’re left with Asset Management Service, but that doesn’t mean anything either. What kind of assets are being managed? What this department is about is Property Management – that means something to most people, SO WHY ON EARTH, BEJASUS, DON’T THEY CALL IT THAT (or something equally meaningful).
Corporate. There are quite a few “corporate” officers about in the weird and wonderful world of local government, such as Corporate Communications Officer – that of course is just a Communications Officer. Such officials work of course for Corporate Services (which means a lot to the average council tax payer). There was a notice recently outside the world's second-largest granite building which proclaimed "New Corporate Headquarters for Aberdeen Council" - now, to council functionaries, corporate may mean something, but it means nothing to most of the public and that should be the point. It's a "New Headquarters," that's what it is. (And the granite building is the magnificent Marischal College).
Comfort and Joy. “Stirling Council is asking businesses and communities to be part of a new public toilet initiative called Comfort Partnership Scheme.” That’s the start of the article I alluded to above. This may be a worthy initiative (OK, it is just that.) but what on earth possessed whoever thought that this is a sensible, meaningful title for it? Is there anyone at all, even the most senior council officers, who have ever referred to a toilet as a “comfort station” or used the term “comfort break” – unless knowingly and ironically mocking this usage. So what should this be called? Obviously a Toilet Partnership Scheme – that’s what it is; toilet is the word most commonly used and universally understood for the facility in question. It is a perfectly respectable word. Comfort means a lot of things but only very rarely does it refer to toilet things. Incidentally the Councillor involved in this area is “Stirling Council’s Portfolio Holder with responsibility for Economy, Tourism and Finance”. Need I say more?
Services. Local authorities are structured into services and often we have a confusing Russian doll structure of services within services (and some of these services have very odd names indeed, like “Services for People” which don’t tell you anything about what they do). Nothing as plain now as “department” or “section”, words which everyone understood.
Finally, and while I’m still reasonably calm, cool and collected, I’d like to introduce you, if you have not previously had the pleasure, to one of the most ridiculous, nonsensical, totally meaningless terms to be encountered in local government. Now there’s a bold claim! I refer to “Single Outcome Agreement”. First I would like to quote a passage from the Scottish Government (Don’t switch off; the best is yet to come!).
The Scottish Government and local government share an ambition to see Scotland's public services working together with private and voluntary sector partners, to improve the quality of life and opportunities in life for people across Scotland. Single Outcome Agreements are an important part of this drive towards better outcomes. They are agreements between the Scottish Government and Community Planning Partnerships which set out how each will work in the future towards improving outcomes for the local people in a way that reflects local circumstances and priorities, within the context of the Government's National Outcomes and Purpose.
All local authorities have Community Planning Partnerships and they’re all working towards these Single Outcome Agreements. But consider the phrase. An agreement is an outcome – you can’t have an agreement without it being the outcome of whatever process preceded the agreement. It has to be a single outcome, because if there isn’t a single outcome there isn’t an agreement – there is in fact what we sometimes refer to as a disagreement. So “single” and “outcome” in this context are unnecessary and add nothing to the meaning of agreement. So that leaves us with Agreement. You can’t call this an Agreement because that it doesn’t tell you anything at all about what kind of agreement it is. So the whole phrase is meaningless (it conveys nothing at all). Who are the eejits who came up with this rubbish? How much are they paid? Are the goats laughing at us? In the coming cutbacks they should be the first to go. It is a COMMUNITY PLANNING AGREEMENT, so why not call it that?
For further comment on unnecessary words there is a previous, and excellent article, which someone has contributed: BAD words - a signage of the times.
NOTE. Following a comment from a reader of this article I have removed the word "pathetic" from the original phrase in para 2, "a whole pathetic plethora of Development Officers". I did not mean to imply that Development Officers were pathetic (which wouldn't be true) - in the context I was referring to the proliferation of this particular element of job titles. I apologise if this was not as not clear as it might have been.
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Subscribe to this comment's feedwritten by Rebecca Maxwell , 2010-09-07 17:51:32
written by Brian Gauldrie , 2010-09-08 13:57:33
written by Brian Forsyth , 2010-09-09 08:31:21
written by Tetrahedron , 2010-09-10 09:12:21
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