A resident reads your planning page twice, then picks up the phone

A resident wants to comment on a neighbour's extension. They find your planning page, read a paragraph about material considerations and statutory consultation periods, read it again, and still do not know what to do. So they ring the planning office, or give up.

The good news is that almost every council page we check is written clearly enough. County councils, London boroughs, metropolitan districts, Scottish councils and Welsh councils are all doing well here. Pages that need a reading age above 12 are rare, but they tend to cluster in a few places:

• Planning pages, especially finding and commenting on a planning application, are the most common. Planning law brings its own vocabulary, and it shows.
• Council housing, adult social care, bin collections, garden waste and household recycling centres each have the odd page that slips.
• District councils, and to a lesser extent unitary councils and Northern Ireland districts, are where these pages turn up most.

When a page does fail, it rarely fails by a little. Most pages that fall short need a reading age of 15 or more. GOV.UK aims for a reading age of 9, so these pages are a long way from that.

This matters most for the residents who most need the service. People applying for housing or asking for care are often stressed, unwell, reading on a phone, or reading in a second language. A page they cannot follow becomes a phone call, a complaint or a missed deadline.

Pages rarely start out hard to read. They drift there. These are the usual causes:

• Policy or legal text pasted straight in. Wording from a planning policy, a housing allocations scheme or a committee report ends up on the public page. It was written for officers and councillors, not residents.
• Long sentences that try to cover every case. One sentence carries the rule, several exceptions and a reference to legislation. Each clause makes sense; together they lose the reader.
• Specialist words with no explanation. Terms like "determination", "eligibility criteria", "assessment of need" or "controlled waste" are everyday words for the service team, not for residents.
• Everything on one page. Who can apply, how to apply, what happens next and the appeal process all sit in one long block of text, with few headings or lists.
• Text written by a supplier. Help text on planning portals, waste booking systems or care forms sometimes comes as a default from the supplier and nobody at the council has edited it.
• Updates layered on top. Each policy change adds a paragraph or a caveat, and nobody rewrites the page as a whole.