Finnish welfare regions make decisions in impenetrable bureaucratic language

Finnish welfare regions are using overly complex and difficult-to-understand language in their decision-making documents, according to a report by national broadcaster Yle.

Key decisions affecting public services—such as the location of health centres and fire stations—are based on hundreds of pages of dense, technical paperwork that even elected officials struggle to comprehend. Some officials admit they do not always read or fully understand the materials before voting.

Riitta Pirttiniemi, a veteran Centre Party representative and chair of Saarijärvi’s city council, described the welfare regions as the “most bureaucratic” compared to municipal and regional councils. “Not all decision-makers necessarily even understand what they have decided,” she said.

The documents often obscure critical details, such as service closures, by burying them in lengthy appendices or using euphemisms. For example, health stations and elderly housing units are not described as being “closed” but rather “removed” from the service network.

Arto Åkerman, an alternate deputy for the Finns Party in Central Finland’s regional council, criticised the 450-page proposal for the region’s service network as deliberately convoluted. “A layperson gets the feeling that this mess was created on purpose,” he said.

Despite legal requirements for public authorities to use clear and understandable language, the documents remain inaccessible. Pirttiniemi noted that the sheer volume—nearly 1,200 pages for a single meeting—makes thorough review impossible. “The text mass is sometimes so large that you wouldn’t have time to do anything else but read them,” she said.

Even AI tools struggle to parse the documents. Yle’s AI-powered summary tool, Harava, failed to highlight key closures in Central Finland’s service network decision, as critical details were scattered across a 193-page appendix rather than the main proposal.

Riikka Nissi, a lecturer in applied linguistics at the University of Jyväskylä, attributed the complexity to the documents being compiled from multiple sources, making them inconsistent and difficult to follow.

The issue is not isolated to one region—all welfare areas produce similarly dense and opaque materials, particularly for budget and service decisions, which routinely exceed 100 pages.