By Susie Violet Ward · City A.M. · 8 June 2023
Written as a City A.M. column in June 2023, the piece criticises the Bank of England and HM Treasury’s consultation on a retail central bank digital currency, which had been due to close on 7 June 2023 and was extended to 30 June after an omission in the questionnaire. The column argues that the consultation had received little media coverage, noting that the BBC website returned a single article on CBDCs, from November 2021.
A health researcher specialising in health literacy assessed the consultation document with the Hemingway app, which rated its readability at Grade 10, equivalent to an average 15 to 16-year-old, while the column puts the average UK reading age at 9. Of the document’s 2,371 sentences, 312 were rated hard to read and 743 very hard, about 45% in total. The column argues that this complexity excluded much of the public and amounted to a national scandal.