There are two parts to the Campaign. One part of the Campaign offers commercial services such as editing and training. This raises the money we need to fund our campaigning activities so that we do not need government grants and can remain politically independent.

Other excellent plain language groups such as the Plain Language Institute and the Plain Language Project in Vancouver as well as the Plain Language Centre (part of the Canadian Legal Information Centre) in Toronto have all had to close when government funding has been cut.

The other half of our work is devoted to campaigning. Our campaigning activities include funding research projects, hosting international conferences, producing free magazines and helping people who have been confused by badly written documents. We also hold an annual awards ceremony in London, to recognise those organisations who have produced particularly clear documents and those who have produced particularly baffling ones.

One thing that is often forgotten is the huge savings that can be made by using plain language techniques. Back in the early 1980s we were involved in one of the most comprehensive reviews of official information ever undertaken by any government. The Rayner review of the UK Government's official communications led to over 171,000 documents being reviewed. 36,000 documents were scrapped because they were outdated and useless, and a further 58,000 were rewritten and redesigned. This work saved central government £15 million and meant that the public would have far less trouble filling in forms.

An independent research project carried out by Coopers and Lybrand Associates looked into the cost of errors which were created by the unclear communications of just one of our many government departments, the Department of Social Security.

This department used some 12,000 different forms, roughly half of which were issued to the public in numbers varying from 10,000 to 30 million copies each year. Estimates made during the course of this assignment suggested that the costs of errors to the department in additional processing costs alone averaged £113,000 for each form every year. For the 6,000 forms issued to the public, the total yearly cost of errors was in the region of £675 million. That gives you an idea of the kind of money that can be wasted by unclear communication.