With the arrival of the nine-person Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) in 1997, the number of published speeches increased further from around 13 per year in the nineties to around 34 in the noughties. Accompanying these speeches were published minutes of MPC meetings. 14 15 16  See Brunner (1981) and Goodfriend (1986). As described by King (2000). Capie (2010). 5  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  5  In 2013, the Bank began issuing so-called “forward guidance” on its policy actions. 17  In 2014, following a  review by David Stockton, the Bank began publishing forecasts for a wider set of variables. 18  And from  2015, following a review by Kevin Warsh, the Bank agreed to publish full transcripts of MPC policy meetings (Table 1). 19  These publications do not capture the entirety of the Bank’s engagement strategy. In 2016 alone, the Bank appeared before Parliament on 22 separate occasions. Senior Bank officials made around 60 visits to the Bank’s regional agencies across the UK. Bank officials visited nearly 5,000 companies and charities. The Bank ran a schools competition, involving over 250 schools. And it hosted a Future Forum, at which it engaged openly with a broad cross-section of the public on a wide range of issues. These step changes in transparency have been broadly mirrored across a range of other central banks.
Complex language is these days more likely to breed mistrust than mystique. Expert opinion has become a source of scepticism rather than reassurance. The well-directed Tweet has displaced the well-argued speech, the Facebook “like” the approving newspaper review, the smiley-faced emoji the hand-written thank-you note. 58  That change in the nature of public language – shorter, simpler, shriller - puts an even greater premium on institutions making themselves understood, despite (indeed, because) of the technocratic task with which they are charged. That means speaking in words and sentences that land rather than levitate with the public, that connect rather than divide public opinion, that illuminate rather than darken public debate. So how well do central banks fare on that front? Earlier this year, the Campaign for Plain English, a militant band of grammarians, turned its attention to the Bank of England MPC’s Monetary Policy Statement. This statement is intended to be a simplified and sanitised account of the MPC’s judgements. The Campaign for Plain English described it as “worthless, impenetrable waffle” and “gobbledygook”. Reading between the lines, I am not sure they liked it. These views are instructive, but subjective. More objective measures have been developed, however, that enable us to measure the linguistic complexity of written and spoken material. For example, some of the more widely-used of these metrics are based on word and sentence length, the use of different word types etc. 57 58 59  59  These metrics can be applied to central bank publications.