This is a copy of my weekly blog which I write for work and is published on the council's intranet.  The views I express in this log are my own, professional, views as the Head of Communications but do not necessarily reflect those of the authority itself.

I want to start this week by saying ‘thanks’.

Thanks for all the supportive comments you sent me regarding my trauma with the TV Licence.  It all seems to be sorted now.  The lovely Jessica has stopped calling.  Our short relationship is over.  But, that’s fine by me.

Thanks also for those of you who’ve stopped me in the corridor to say nice things about this Log.  You’re all very kind.

Anyway – we’re in a new week, so it’s time to talk about new things.

We’re about to launch a new ‘campaign’ around plain English.  We’ve had the brilliant and fantastic Rosana Rategh working with us for a number of months and she’s been developing a workshop we can run for all staff.

There have been a number of pilot sessions and the feedback so far has been great.

The campaign is the result of concerns raised by councillors who say increasing numbers of formal committee reports and documents are confusing and difficult to read.  One of them told me ‘if I can’t understand the content of the report, how can I be expected to make an informed decision?’.

That’s a fair point and one that’s difficult to argue against.

Yesterday, a colleague and I had to go to the central and corporate scrutiny board to talk to members about our plain English aspirations.

They raised a number of issues and concerns.  One was bad grammar, another was the incorrect use of apostrophes and a third was ‘the terrible use of English generally’ as one councillor put it.

But the biggest annoyance was acronyms and abbreviations.  Members said we used them too often and on many occasions we don’t even explain what they mean.

Now, I think ridding our communications of both is going to be a tough nut to crack.  They are embedded in our culture here.  It’s the language we’re used to.

Here’s the proof of why I think it’s going to be a challenge.

When I was explaining to councillors that we had support from senior officers for the plain English campaign I told them we were going to take a report to CLT.

‘CLT!’ exclaimed the chairman.  ‘Now you’re doing it!’

Ooops.  That was a big boob for the head of communications to make.  There I was talking about how to rid the council of acronyms and abbreviations while also using one myself.

That’s the problem.

(At this point I turned round and had to ask Dave Marsh from the Yorkshire Evening Post not to write that down in his report.)

You’ll be hearing more about our plain English campaign over the coming weeks as we start running the workshops and I look forward to seeing you at one of them.

Next – Harold Wilson once said: ‘A week is a long time in politics.’

I want to move that saying on so it becomes ‘A lot can change in a week in politics’.

I mention this because I think last week was the strangest so far in my short career in local government communications.

About 10 days ago, we (the council) were in the midst of a PR ‘war’ with the unions over the bin strike.  We were saying our thing and they were saying theirs and not surprisingly those two sets of messages were quite different from each other.

Fast forward to last Thursday then when I was having a casual ‘friendly’ chat with the man from Unison to make sure he was happy with a statement … I had written on behalf of his union and the GMB.

It was quite surreal – us ‘handling the communications’ for the two unions who for the previous two weeks we’d been ‘battling’ against.

Let’s hope some progress can now be made in the talks which are underway.

Finally, if ever there was an award for ‘a councillor getting themselves in the national media with the strangest story ever’ then I’d give it to this man.

I’m wondering whether we could come up with a bizarre story which we could hold in reserve for use if we ever need to deflect attention.

Perhaps it could be something like: ‘Council leader abducted by refuse truck shaped flying machine …’ or ‘Launch of new self-emptying bins in Leeds …’

Dear reader I know that you’re a creative type; so please send in your suggestions by return.  I may even be able to rustle up a small prize for the best one.