Complicated, lengthy documents and 100-page-long agendas are making it hard for people in Sheffield to access vital information – it has been claimed.

Members of Sheffield City Council’s Governance Committee said during a meeting on April 30 that documents of up to 400 pages and lengthy agendas were off-putting to members of the public.

Councillor Julie Grocutt said: “The reports need to be considerably shorter they really really do. We can not go on expecting officers to write such lengthy reports, expecting members to read them and expecting members of the public to understand what is going on in those reports”

During a council meeting it was suggested that reports produced by the city council needed to be shorter for staff and the general public so that they are easy to digest and understand.

The committee papers and meetings were reviewed in the council meeting to see how the council could be more accessible to citizens. This included the formatting of reports and agenda packs with importance being on bringing main points of information on the reports.

The discussion then moved to how the size of these reports needed to be dramatically decreased.

Councillor Grocutt said: “If I was a member of the public taking my own committee and I wanted to look at something in adult health and social care and I opened the document to find that it was over 400 pages long I wouldn’t know where to start.

“So there is no way that that is accessible to the public when health and social care is such an important issue for so many of us all across the city.”

Councillor Elle Dodd agreed with this saying: “We want it to be more accessible to citizens too.” 

The council has said that the Equality Impact Assessments and Climate Impact Assessments  will be published in a streamlined report template to ensure consistency and communicating clearly to the public and councillors what is happening and what is going to happen. 

They have proposed for the 2025/26 reports that there will be easy to read summaries with key points in reports which would summaries all key points and not just introducing.