AS someone who reads council documents every week, I’ve been pleasantly surprised in recent months at the lack of appalling English within them.

There seems to have been a decline in the number of “key stakeholders" and "partnership working" and all those other awful phrases which used to litter Kirklees paperwork.

Maybe the council is living up to its promise to start using the English language. Or perhaps it’s just that repeated exposure to council-ese has made me immune.

But, despite the general improvement, there is still the occasional linguistic outrage. Last week, while ploughing through a council report on the proposed improvements to Lydgate Special School in New Mill, I noticed that council officers had decided the upgrade would cost £575,000.

In fact they "robustly estimated" that it would cost that amount. I groaned and put my head in my hands at the sight of such a linguistic abomination.

"Robust" is one of those horrible New Labour phrases, like "aspiration" or "weapons of mass destruction".

Ministers in the former government were forever being "robust". When something went wrong they would rush to the nearest studio to assure us there would be a "robust inquiry" - the opposite of a whitewash, you understand.

So I wasn’t happy to see the "r" word appearing in a Kirklees document. It brought back all those bad memories.

But to see the word "robustly" next to the word "estimated" made it even worse.

If something is robust, it is strong, definite. But that’s not what an estimate is - it’s an educated guess, a conjecture.

By it’s very nature, an estimate is not robust.

Don’t you see that, Mr Kirklees?

And you’d been doing so well.